Awarded his MBE in 1998 for services to NOTA (National Association for the Development of Work with Sexual Offenders) Tony first qualifed as a social worker in 1977. He worked as a Probation Officer in Manchester and then as a Child Protection Officer for the NSPCC in Rochdale before becoming a manager of the team.

 

Since 1989, he has been working as an Independent Social Care Consultant and Trainer. In this capacity he has undertaken a wide variety of training and consultative work. This includes single and multi-agency work with Social Services, Health, Education, Probation, YOS and voluntary agencies, mainly in the UK, but also overseas. Tony's work covers a broad range of managerial, service delivery and developmental aspects related to child welfare/protection. These include: inter-agency collaboration, leadership development, and staff supervision.

 

Tony is a well know writer and has written several books on supervision and recently wrote a national guide to supervision called "Right from the Start" (CWDC 2008). This is the basis of a national supervision training programme that he is currently co-directing with Jan Wonnacott. Tony has been extensively involved in consultation work with Local Safeguarding Chidren Boards. Last year in conjunction with Prof. Jan Horwath he researched and developed a Self Assessment and Improvement Tool (SAIT) which all Welsh LSCBs are being required to use in preparation for external inspections.

In relation to practice, Tony has many areas of interest: these include assessment, adult attachment, emotional intelligence and motivational interviewing. He was also the founding chair of NOTA and has been heavily involved in the development of policy and practice guidance in relation to young people who sexually abuse others. He was the external consultant to the development in the creation of the AIM framework for the assessment of young people during his time working with the GMAP service in Manchester. Tony is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Huddersfield.

The safeguarding children e-Academy were priveleged to have Tony as our guest speaker at our Manchester event in August this year; to find out more about this event click here: If you weren't lucky enough to get a place at our recent event on Emotional Intelligence, you can access the podcast of the event by clicking here

Please be aware that this is podcast quality and you will get a better experience if you use headphones. The podcast will only work in Internet Explorer and if you have a slow internet connection you may have to wait a while for the video files to download over the web.

You can download a copy of Tony's paper by clicking here