Event Details

This session in our From Insight to Action series brings research, lived experience and practice into conversation. Focusing on parents’ experiences of visiting children in care, it explores contact, loss and relational justice across social work, law and social policy.

The Centre for Child and Family Justice Research invites you to the next session in our From Insight to Action series. These online events bring together researchers, practitioners and people with lived experience to explore new ideas, emerging evidence and practice questions across disciplines. The series offers a space to test thinking, share work in progress and engage in critical, intersectional conversations about justice, care and social policy.

We are pleased to welcome Polly Baynes (University of Bristol), a former children and families social worker with 36 years of practice experience and now a doctoral researcher. Polly’s work focuses on family time and contact in the context of care proceedings.

In this webinar, Polly will present research exploring parents’ experiences of visiting their children in care, including parents with learning disabilities and those still involved in proceedings.

The study examines family time as a complex emotional and relational space in which parents continue to express care, sustain identity and navigate loss. It also highlights how professional relationships and service responses shape experiences of recognition, stigma and hope.

The session will be relevant to colleagues across social policy, law, sociology, social work, health and related fields, as well as practitioners and students interested in relational and humane approaches to care, separation and family justice.

Polly has developed a range of widely used practice resources on contact and communication with children and families. These include:

• Why am I living at Jeanie’s house? Answering children’s questions when they come into care
• Staying in touch: Contact after adoption (Research in Practice)