John Woodhouse has a background in management of residential children’s homes, senior management experience in local authorities with both children in care and child protection services, and chaired the national organisation for children’s rights officers and advocates. He was lead children’s services officer for a large-scale child exploitation investigation and brings a passion for systems thinking, risk assessment and placing children at the centre of everything we do. He is managing director of dialogue, a training and consultancy company.

Presentation Title: Children Missing from Care

Joint presentation with Rachael Courage

One in ten young people go missing from care, usually multiple times. They often experience significant harm, compounding the abuse, neglect or other vulnerabilities that led to them being in care. Additionally, these young people are over-reported to the Police, undermining relationships, marking them out as different and risking criminalisation.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council and Independent Children’s Homes Association have been working in partnership to produce a framework around the appropriate level of intervention to ensure a prompt and appropriate response to young people going missing from care. Dialogue was commissioned to produce a free training pack which we will be introducing and sharing at the conference, alongside a new Child Exploitation Leads group for those working with young people in and leaving care run in partnership with NWG Network.

Amanda Naylor has worked for the past 25 years in the third sector, international development and social care sector supporting and safeguarding child victims, disabled children, looked after children, young people subject to safeguarding procedures and young people in youth justice system.

Amanda has a Masters in Forensic Psychology, Diploma in Social Work and JNC Youth Work Qualified.

Her career began as a frontline qualified detached youth worker in the North of England, and has seen her take roles in relation to children’ rights, managing statutory social work and multi-agency teams, international development and management of large scale national programmes and initiatives.

Since June 2022 she has take on the role of CEO at Manchester Youth Zone.  A vibrant youth and community provision with world class facilities, working with over 1,000 children and young people aged 8 -25 years and families per week in North Manchester.  This work is delivered through through a range of open youth work and targeted provision including: sports; outdoor education; issue based youth programmes; social action projects; enterprise and careers support; street based detached work; serious youth violence programmes; mental health and emotional wellbeing provision.    

Prior to this Amanda headed up the national DFE funded COVID-19 response Barnardo’s service ‘See, Hear Respond’ coordinating across the sector to get support to those children who are most in need. Amanda also led the delivery of Barnardo’s 10 year strategy on child sexual abuse and wider exploitation, incorporating child sexual exploitation, trafficking and harmful sexual behaviour, serious youth violence and criminal exploitation.  This involved overseeing investment in the design and implementation of new approaches whilst leading an improvement programme across the existing 50+ services across the UK’s 4 Nations working with complex abuse and exploitation. 

Amanda has sat on the Centre for Expertise (CSA), National Contextual Safeguarding and NOTA Advisory Boards and is a representative on the APCC child sexual abuse network and NWG policy forum.

Presentation Title: The role of youth work in contextual safeguarding and interventions that make a difference.