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Professor Jenny Woodman is Professor of Child and Family Policy, based in IOE's Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU).
What is the focus of your research?
I am a public health researcher in child and family policy, with a particular (but not exclusive) focus on the earlier years of a child’s life. Each of my studies is another little bit of the jigsaw in describing and evaluating public services for vulnerable child and their families.
Because my work mainly focuses on families where parents need extra help and support to care for their children and/or are living in very difficulty circumstances (e.g. poverty), my studies often consider the interface of child health, social care services and wider services from the local council. Where are these children popping up in the system and why, which health professionals can and should support them, what does and should that support looks like in practice and – crucially – how does it fit with the role of social workers, other professionals and services available from the council?
I have also conducted or been involved in research about A&E, hospital admissions, outpatient clinics, GP services, social care services, schools, the family courts and – most recently – health visiting.
What working achievement or initiative are you most proud of?
“I’ve been making the same core arguments, with increasing nuance and detail, for well over a decade now and this has contributed to the changing landscape of child health policy. This has been a sustained drip-drip impact in two main areas, which has occurred in a wider body of academic work and over many years."
First, in the broadening focus of child health policy to include parental health – helping a parent to be physically, mentally and emotionally well can help their child to be the same. This may sound obvious but seeing and then helping the adult behind the child patient can be difficult in busy clinical services.
My work is just one strand in a large body of research in this area, all of which I have drawn on to argue this message consistently for 15 years, including in my regular interactions with the Department for Health and Social Care in my role of Co-Director of the NIHR Children and Families Policy Research Unit.
Secondly, I’ve contributed to changes in policy in the still-contentious area of what should happen when a health professional is worried about the way a child is being cared for at home but the concerns are not enough at that moment to warrant an assessment by children’s social care.
It was a significant shift when the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) acknowledged in their 2009 guidelines (CG89, 2009) that there may be children who prompt concerns about abuse and neglect in health care settings but who either who won’t get referred to children’s social care or whose referral might not be taken forward. NICE clearly stating that these families existed was a key first step in developing policy to support these children and families. Since then, further guidelines from NICE (NG76, 2017) have fleshed out how health professionals might best work with families who prompt concerns about abuse and neglect, putting good working relationships with parents and carers at the core of any response.
I am proud that my research is included in the underpinning evidence for both these NICE guidelines, which I consider steps forward in the area of child health policy.
How did you come to your position at IOE?
It was the reputation of the Social Research Institute that drew me in, particularly of Thomas Coram Research Unit which conducts world-leading research in my area (children and families) with a strong focus on inequalities, cross-disciplinarity and innovative methods.
Previous to that I had been at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health since 2005 as both a PhD student and researcher, with a brief hiatus to do a Master's in Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
What do you most enjoy about your role?
Without a shadow of a doubt, I most enjoy working with and alongside inspirational colleagues who are committed to researching important and complex social issues. I have learned enormously from conversations with colleagues whose social research is different from mine in terms of international focus, topic, discipline and methods – and we are lucky that the Social Research Institute has such breath and innovation in approaches to researching social issues.
My students (MSc and PhD) are bright, curious and constructively challenging and I enjoy seeing them developing their ideas and expanding my own thinking through them.
What's the most important thing you've learned from your students?
That the ‘teacher’ never stops learning, including and perhaps especially from the ‘students’.
What is currently top of your to-do list?
Part of my portfolio of research at the moment are two NIHR studies and a doctoral study on health visiting. These studies are highly cross-disciplinary, bringing together social science with epidemiology and economics and involving multiple universities and partners from the policy and practice world. I hope that these studies will provide evidence to help national decision-makers further understand how health visiting works to improve child health and safeguard against harm, protect against further cuts to the government investment in health visiting and inform how local councils commission and manage their health visiting service.
Cross-disciplinarity and cross-sector work is also a core component of the work we do in the NIHR Children and Families Policy Research Unit, of which I am Co-Director, and through our regular interactions with policy colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care and Department for Education we inform specific policies and the general direction of travel.
I also co-lead the Children's Social Care Data User Group (CSCDUG), a cross-disciplinary network of 150 members from universities, charities, government departments and arms-lengths bodies and information and performance managers from children’s social care in local areas in England. CSCDUG is a knowledge exchange network to improve the way we all use administrative data from children’s social care to understand and improve the lives of children and families.
What might it surprise people to know about you?
I didn’t do any Science or Maths A-levels and did two degrees in English Literature before I turned to public health.
How do you think UCL being based in London benefits the work you do?
UCL is a world-leading university, with world-leading experts and I am lucky enough to be working with many UCL colleagues across Faculties and Departments as partners in funded research projects. UCL is both strong in Social Science and Epidemiology and access to these networks facilitates my research. The academic infrastructure at UCL is strong – in terms of data services (e.g. the data safe haven), libraries and seed funding to grow small ideas into big ones, which I have myself used
What other area of research interests you outside of your main area of specialism?
Child psychology!
