I have worked within the field of child protection for 11 years, across local authority and residential settings. For the past seven years, I have worked independently for local authorities, completing parenting assessments and offering mentalization based parenting intervention.

My PhD research focused on exploring the influencing factors on the outcome of parent-child intervention and followed parents placed in either a residential or foster-care placement with their babies for 12 weeks. I identified distinct thematic differences between those who had a positive outcome and returned to the community with their babies and those that did not, and these themes became factors termed ‘change facilitators’ or ‘change inhibitors’.