Profile

Patrick Ayre, Senior Lecturer in Social Work

I have been a Senior Lecturer at the University since 1994. I am a qualified social worker and before joining the University, worked in local authority child care and child protection services for some seventeen years, progressing from social worker to manager of child protection services.

I have maintained my interest in child welfare, teaching and researching primarily in this field, though I have a strong interest in social work theory and social work education more generally. In the last 5 years, I have had some 25 articles and chapters published in wide variety of different journals and books, many of them co-authored with colleagues from the University.

I have also undertaken some challenging work with colleagues from the practice community, both in completing joint research and in preparing guidance and training materials, such as the widely used training pack Safeguarding Children: Everybody’s Business, produced for the NSPCC.

I am a regular contributor to Community Care, magazine, writing, amongst other things, the ‘independent opinion’ slots in the field of child protection. I was editor of the journal Social Work in Europe from 1999-2002.

I have been a member of the Luton Local Safeguarding Children Board and its predecessors since 1993 and managed its multi-agency training programme for a number of years. I try to maintain my practice skills through my work as a Children’s Guardian for CAFCASS and I am a member of the CAFCASS approved trainer bank.

I also act as a consultant in child welfare services, both at the service and the case level. One particularly interesting, though demanding, aspect of my work as a consultant involves the chairing of enquiries in the field of child protection conducted under Chapter 8 of Working Together to Safeguard Children.

These enquiries are held when a child has died or suffered serious harm, and abuse or neglect is known or suspected to be a factor in what has occurred. I have conducted ten Serious Case Reviews in the last three years in authorities from the Merseyside to the south coast.

I have been involved in providing consultation on the management of complex cases to the Department of Human Services in Melbourne, Australia, providing training on report writing in Northern Ireland and overseeing the production of procedures and protocols for working with violent and inaccessible families and for working with families where problematical drug and alcohol use are an issue.

I am a member of the Society of Expert Witnesses and an Expert Member of the Association of Child Abuse Lawyers, providing expert witness evidence in cases in which local authorities are being sued for negligence.