About Us

I hold the Practice Teaching Award (PTA) and registered with Social Work England Number SW67958. I am keen to understand the experiences of students and practitioners from different minority and or marginalised groups and how these experiences can be used to develop strategies and tools to facilitate change and enhance the student journey and subsequently their professional careers. I am a firm advocate of equality, fairness and respect for diversity and I maintain that as human beings, we are generally less accepting of people who are different to ourselves. I also acknowledge that this is often as a result of prejudice, stereotypes, assumptions about people, a lack of openness about our anxieties and unfamiliarity with certain groups and individuals.  Where there is an acknowledgment of this, good working relationships can be developed and sustained. However where these attitudes are allowed to thrive the impact on professional relationships can be detrimental to all involved. It is within this context that I situate my research interests- how do various groups of students navigate the student journeys and future careers? How can their learning journeys be enhanced? What (if anything) is my  professional contribution  to enhancing their journeys?

I began to respond to these dilemmas in 2008 in collaboration with two of my colleagues and in 2012, reported the outcomes of using culturally relevant case studies to support one of my students.

That same year, the MANDELA Model was developed as a relationship based tool to facilitate the relationship building specifically between social work students and their practice educators.

For my  doctoral studies, I examined the experiences of Black African students on social work placements in England. It is qualitative study drawing upon the principles of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a framework which centralises Race in research involving people from BME backgrounds.

The idea of this website came about due to difficulty in locating research about diversity within the context of social work practice learning and particularly for students of Black and Minority Ethnic backgrounds.