Professional Experiences

I have a big appetite; for cake, contributing to children and young people being totally awesome and truly authentic, and learning about anything… well not everything but a lot of things.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time studying for a bachelor’s and master’s degree in the arts, specialising in community theatre which led me to create and run a youth theatre charity for 13 wonderful years. If only I knew what I know now, as my practice would have been even better!

I have worked in a local authority in youth work, education, and children’s services for over 20 years. During that time, I achieved a Churchill Fellowship Award, visiting New York and Connecticut to research behaviour support. I gained Cornell University Therapeutic Crisis Intervention Professional Certification – only 7 in the UK have achieved such a level. I have a level 7 CPD certification in Trauma Informed Care and I am a Neuro-Linguistics Programming Master Practitioner.

For the last 14 years, I have relished researching and designing courses to train Children’s Services colleagues. I’ve been fortunate to work with school colleagues, foster carers, residential children home practitioners, early help colleagues, and social workers. My favourite subjects are behaviour support, child development, trauma-informed practice, self-care, and attachment.

I believe these interlacing subjects can support children, young people, families, and colleagues to be their unique selves and develop healthy strategies to adapt and respond to life experiences.

I was a young person who followed my interests, so I decided the arts and working with young people was for me. Early into my career, I knew I wanted to empower young people to reach their full potential. It distresses me to see children with mental health issues or didn’t see how wonderful they are. Everyone deserves to feel secure, worthy, aspirational, and proud of themselves.

Professional and Personal Worlds Collide

So, you think having a career working with children and young people and knowing a little theory, becoming a parent would be like sliding into comfy pj’s. Unfortunately, this was not my experience. Firstly, as a new parent, I listened to very traditional parenting advice, which conflicted with the evidence-based parenting strategies I had been researching and teaching colleagues for years.

As a new mum, I was critical of myself. It is really hard to put the theory into practice. I was trying to change how I responded to stress so I could parent how I wanted to (whilst parenting!!). I started to put more time into researching self-care and converting evidence-based research into simple ways that helped my daily life.

Whilst on maternity leave, I had a dream about a child called River. This was the beginning of developing an interactive children’s story encapsulating my years of professional and personal experiences. For the first time my worlds collided; mum, artist, author, trainer, and researcher all in one place.

My grammar is alarming, just like my disarrayed hair in the morning, and yet I began creating resources for children, schools, parenting programmes, and caregivers. As my aspirations and confidence grew and with the help of some amazing mentors, you are here, scrolling through my handiwork.

I hope you spend time exploring the different resources and articles. You might want to start on the home page to help navigate where you fancy going next.

Michelle x (now I’ll sashay away)