Speakers

Mark Riddell

Mark Riddell left local authority care in 1984 and spent years working with a range of organisations to campaign for better support for care leavers before training as a social worker in 1990. He was the Service Manager for children in care and leaving care at Trafford council until 2017. In 2015 Ofsted rated the Trafford’s quality of care leaver provision at the council as ‘outstanding’.  Trafford was the first in the country to achieve this.

In 2017 he received an MBE in the Queen’s New Year Honours list for his outstanding contribution to children in care and care leavers.

He was appointed as the National Implementation Adviser for Care Leavers within the Department for Education.  Previous to this he worked informally alongside the Children’s Minister Edward Timpson on the Care Leavers Strategy – Keep on Caring and the C&SW Act that introduced a new set of Corporate Parenting Duties, the consultation and publication of the local offer to care leavers and the Personal Advisor  duty to 25yrs for all care leavers.

Mark also penned a book called The Cornflake Kid which about his time in the care system and subsequent travels around the world – including a chance casting in one of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo movies.

Anne Hollonds

Anne Hollonds is Australia’s National Children’s Commissioner, a role based at the Australian Human Rights Commission.

The National Children’s Commissioner monitors policy and legislation to ensure that the human rights of children are protected and promoted, and provides advice to government.

Formerly Director of the Australian Institute of Family Studies, for 23 years Anne was Chief Executive of government and non-government organisations focused on research, policy and practice in child and family wellbeing.

As a psychologist Anne has worked extensively in frontline practice, including in child protection; domestic, family and sexual violence; mental health; child and family counselling; parenting education; and family law counselling.

Anne currently contributes to numerous expert advisory groups and boards. Her report ‘Help Way Earlier!’ How Australia can transform child justice to improve safety and wellbeing’ was tabled in the Australian Parliament in August 2024.

Robbie Gilligan

Robbie Gilligan holds a Professor Emeritus appointment at the School of Social Work and Social Policy, Trinity College Dublin. He has published widely in relation to the experiences of children and young people in out of home care and care experienced adults (with a strong focus on their work and education journeys).

He is currently Co-Principal Investigator of Ten Years On – a national study of care leavers in their late twenties in Ireland.  He has also served as an adviser (2021-22) to the Organisation for Economic Coooperation and Development report on care-leavers – the first such intervention by OECD on this topic: Improving care leavers’ socioeconomic outcomes | The OECD Forum Network (oecd-forum.org).

See https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4150-3523 for a full list of his publications and outputs

Louise Roberts

Louise Roberts is a Reader in Social Work and Assistant Director of CASCADE (the Children’s Social Care Research and Development Centre) at Cardiff University. Louise has a range of research experience related to young people in and leaving state care, including studies related to education, leaving care support and parenting. Louise is currently part of the research team evaluating the Basic Income for Care Leavers in Wales pilot.

Louise is passionate about involving individuals with care-experience in all aspects of the research process and seeking to use research findings to influence policy and practice.

Professor Pat McGorry

Professor Pat McGorry AO is a psychiatrist known world-wide for his development and scaling up of early intervention and youth mental health services and for mental health innovation, advocacy and reform. He is Executive Director of Orygen, Professor of Youth Mental Health at the University of Melbourne, and founding editor of the journal Early Intervention in Psychiatry. He has played a key advocacy and advisory role to government and health system reform in Australia and in many parts of the world and chaired the Expert Advisory Committee of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System.

In 2010 Professor McGorry was selected as Australian of the Year and became an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO).