Creating and sustaining an anti-racist culture in social work

Millie Kerr qualified as a social worker in Oxford in 1994 and has 30 years’ experience working as social worker, team manager and children’s services manager within local authority children’s services, adult social care and the charity sector. She has worked across a range of fields including safeguarding and child protection, HIV, palliative care, child asylum, child trafficking, leaving care, and within a specialist Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and safeguarding service. She has worked in the area of anti-racist practice and racial equity since November 2020 in Brighton & Hove. She is also a practice educator and delivers training on anti-racist practice, racial equity and cultural competence/humility within social work and more widely.

Professor Kish Bhatti-Sinclair’s academic career began at University of Southampton with a lifelong commitment to combating racism, shaping debates on black perspectives and de-colonising social work practice. As a professor of social work at the University of Chichester she has developed methodologies and theories such as “modern racism” to test discriminatory attitudes and behaviours and worked on research projects including studies on child sexual exploitation and “hard to reach” children.

She is co-editor-in-chief of the Wiley journal Child Abuse Review owned by the Association of Child Protection Professionals and her books include Anti-Racist Practice in Social Work (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Diversity, Difference and Dilemmas (OUP/McGraw Hill, 2017).

She co-ordinates many academic and local authority partnership groups including the Social Work Education Anti-Racist Social Work Education Network. As the co-ordinator for the Centre for Workforce Development she has undertaken a three-year evaluative review on the needs of the health and social care workforce in the south east of England which has contributed to strategic planning.

Vivian Okeze-Tirado is a social worker, practice educator and author and runs VOT Training and Consultancy. The service, which is provided across the UK virtually and face-to-face, aims to empower professionals with knowledge and information in the fields of social work, social care, foster care, equality, diversity and inclusion. Its robust, dynamic and interactive training sessions combine emotional intelligence with cultural sensitivity to ensure safeguarding of vulnerable service users is at the heart of practice.

Pam Shodeinde is an advanced social work practitioner working with children and families in the East Midlands. Since qualifying as a social worker in 2019, she has worked to ensure her practice is embedded in fairness and equality for those she works with and more widely through her work with the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) as a founding member of the BASW BPS (Black professional Symposium) group. She is a speaker and an advocate and her work has focused on anti-racism and cultural sensitivity in social work with a particular interest in supporting students and newly qualified social workers.