Student Profile: Judy

A graduate of our Master’s programme, Judy will shortly also complete a Professional Doctorate in Consulting and Leading in Organisations.

Judy is not afraid of a challenge. She was already working towards a PhD at the University of Sterling when she embarked on first our Master’s Degree then Professional Doctorate in Consulting and Leading in Organisations. “I love learning!”, she says. “There was no requirement on me to do any training. But I wanted to leave a legacy of some important research.”

Judy’s research is indeed important. After completing social work training, she first worked in a therapeutic community for young people, before building a career delivering consultancy in residential childcare – supporting communities and professionals across the whole of the UK. These are complex and challenging environments, with children who bring “a lot of distress” and practitioners who often “have complex histories themselves”. Having support from a consultant is therefore vital. “There’s a lot of things going on at a group level and at an individual level within residential childcare”, Judy explains. “Consultancy provides space to think, space to feel, space to reflect. It’s about helping people to understand some of the group and organisational processes that are going on, rather than just being swept along with them.”

Judy’s professional doctoral thesis at Tavistock Education and Training explores the use of physical restraint in residential childcare – an area in which there has historically been very little primary research. Recent studies have examined the effectiveness and morality of the practice, but Judy chose instead to focus on the experiences of the adult staff members who use physical restraint. “I wanted to understand what was happening inside them, what their feelings were in the process leading up to and during a restraint, what was happening between them and the child, from their perspective, and also what systemic factors were affecting their decision-making and the process”.

Judy invited adult practitioners to join reflective group sessions and individual interviews, which she recorded and analysed, then triangulated the results among a group of senior managers in a separate institution. The findings were “fascinating”, revealing “the level of moral distress that exists among the adults, how awful they found it, how morally compromised they felt, but how impossible it was not to use physical restraints”. They also exposed the unforeseen impact on other children in the residences, who were asked not to be near for their own safety but could hear what was happening, often replicating early traumatic experiences. Judy’s conclusions underline the importance of having spaces to reflect and think for the professionals who work in residential childcare settings. “My basic recommendation is you shouldn’t really be doing this job unless you’ve got space for reflection”, she says. “And the realisation actually that if you don’t have that, you’re a heartbeat away from restraint becoming abuse.”

While Judy benefited from a doctoral supervisor who was very familiar with her sector and work, the subject matter of her research was quite different to that of some of her peers on the doctorate. Fortunately, everyone recognised both the universality of the concepts explored, and the richness to be found in “understanding each other’s worlds”. “Many of them were actually in corporate settings, which for me was a mind blower because I didn’t think this would actually be relevant and it was very relevant”, she says. “It was very interesting hearing people making use of the “Tavi” concepts in settings which I was very unfamiliar with. I found it useful and very interesting.” In fact, the group still meets now. “We kind of replicate the processes that we had in the Tavi, we support each other with our work in the same way”, Judy explains. “So it’s a continuing experience and support, which is not something that I recognise from any other educational experience I’ve had. It was amazing.”

Coming to the end of this journey is proving difficult, leaving “a big, big gap” in Judy’s life. She sees the doctorate as an “end of career experience” – allowing her to invest time and energy in something that she felt truly passionate about. “The reason I wanted to do it was because it mattered to me and to the sector”, she concludes. “It’s probably the most challenging learning experience that I’ve had, certainly on par with the PhD in terms of the intellectual challenge, but also the emotional challenge of the process itself, because it’s all about you – you are absolutely at the centre of it; you have to reflect on yourself in every way.”