Professor Janet Melville-Wiseman says she has been swimming against the tide for most of her life.
Having left school and the care system with “little more than a swimming certificate”, Professor Melville-Wiseman is now the University’s first Professor of Social Work, and possibly the first in the UK to hold such a position with care experience.
Despite her own academic success, she is still fighting to ensure the voices of abused young people are heard; to influence the strategic direction of her profession and make care experience the tenth protected characteristic under the Equality Act.
“It’s taken me longer than most people to achieve what I’ve wanted to achieve, but that’s not surprising”, said Professor Melville-Wiseman who had a disrupted education with her first experience of care at 14, shortly followed by being taken into care at 15. At 18 Professor Melville-Wiseman experienced the ‘care-cliff’ when she had to leave care with no money, little support, nowhere to live, no qualifications and no job.
Social work is fundamentally a relationship-based profession. In my view this should not simply mean that we set about identifying where there may be problematic relationships and then offer to fix them. It it is about how we can best understand complex relational dynamics that are sometimes full of strengths but often full of risks.
Professor Janet Melville-Wiseman
After initially working in children’s homes, Professor Melville-Wiseman gained the opportunity to train to be a social worker. During 20 years in practice, she gained a master’s degree and then left practice to do a PhD at the University of Kent. In 2005 she joined the academic staff at Canterbury Christ Church University to lead the University’s first MA in Social Work.
Professor Melville-Wiseman explains: "I wanted to take a step back from practice to be able to add to our knowledge base about those issues. I also wanted to be free to challenge some perhaps entrenched assumptions in the profession whilst also having an opportunity to realise my own academic potential.
“My personal experiences of the care system have informed my academic work on sexual abuse in mental health services, social work at the interface between religion, faith and sexual orientation and how we can better understand the need to support social workers with personal connections to the work they do and the trauma in other that they will have to deal with. These are often the things that as a society we find difficult to know about and difficult to speak about, so I am immensely grateful for the personal and professional support I have received to undertake work that is important to me and to our profession.
“I have also been able to promote social work relational activism within my elected role as Chair of the Joint Universities Social Work Association, which works at a strategic level to represent and promote the social work academy with government departments and social work regulators across the four nations of the UK.”
Professor Melville-Wiseman also plans to use her personal experiences to inform key research on the long-term impact of being in care as a child.
“You are thrust into a world of fending for yourself, despite bearing the psychological scars of a traumatic childhood. But we know little of the long-term effects of developmental trauma upon people’s lives.
“There are many reasons why we need to be looking at the long-term impact of care experience. For example, if you develop a health condition there may be questions about whether your parent had the same condition, but you won’t necessarily know your family medical history. If you’ve had a traumatic experience in care as child, how will you feel about perhaps needing residential care later in life? How do you feel about becoming a parent, forming your own family? The legacy of care experiences can be complex and enduring.”
Professor Melville-Wiseman also believes that making care experience a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010, giving people who are in or have been in care the same legal protection against discrimination as the other listed characteristics, will also help to negate some of those long-term effects. It was a recommendation of the recent government review into children’s social care, Stable Homes Built on Love, but will not be implemented, against the wishes of care experienced people.
She said: "There are many negative assumptions and discourses around children in care, as though they have needed care as a result of the doing something wrong. However, most children end up in care because someone did something wrong to them, and typically the worst kinds of traumatic experiences any child could experience. If it was a protected characteristic, it could help to change some of that negativity. It would help to prevent discrimination, spark conversations that challenge negative assumptions, and go some way to empower people who have experienced trauma-based discrimination.
“It would also mean organisations would record data on care experienced employees and universities would also capture data on care experienced students and applicants. It would give us data which would help us to identify and work towards ways of working differently, to understand the support people with care experience might need. If race wasn’t a protected characteristic, we would probably not be aware of the current attainment gaps; or if sex wasn’t a protected characteristic, we would not know that there are 20,000 professors in the UK, but only 5,000 are female."
“The University is doing well supporting care experienced students. At the moment there is a powerful movement to ask local authorities to declare care experience a protected characteristic regardless of the law not yet changing. Almost a 100 have signed up to this and Canterbury Christ Church University could be the first university to declare this. It is also just as important for me, as possibly the first Professor of Social Work in the UK with care experience to recognise that achievement and show that being in care doesn’t have to define your future.”
Professor Janet Melville-Wiseman
The University has a proud record of supporting care experienced and estranged students into higher education, consistently top 5 for incoming care leaver students*. The School and College Engagement (SCE) team link with the Local Authority Virtual Schools in Kent and Medway, charities including Young Lives Foundation and the Kent Refugee Action Network, as well as our collaborative partners at the Universities of Kent, UCA and Greenwich to deliver targeted outreach to children in care. In addition to bespoke outreach opportunities, each year the University hosts a collaborative two-day children-in-care Easter School to increase knowledge of and support aspirations to access higher education, as well as a series of online HE insight sessions, ‘Opening Doors’ designed to upskill Foster Carers to support their young person’s journey to university.
Each September, there is an enhanced induction for new care leaver students that outlines the additional support available at the University, which is a proud signatory of the Care Leaver Covenant.
The University has also recently announced a new partnership with the Unite Foundation that will offer, from September 2024, three care-experienced or estranged students free year-round University accommodation over three years.
The Inaugural Lecture for Professor Melville-Wiseman, Swimming against the tide for relational activism in social work, takes place on Wednesday 22 May, 5.15-7pm, Old Sessions House, OS.0.01, Longport, Canterbury, CT1 1NX. Visit our events pages for more information and to book your place.
* Student Finance England data