Beverley Barnett-Jones

Honorary Graduate, 2024

Beverley is a qualified social worker and has worked in the field of child protection and family justice for many years. In 2018 she was awarded an MBE for work with children and families.

Whilst working for Coventry City Council, Beverley used ideas and principles of problem solving and therapeutic interventions, based on the Family, Drug and Alcohol Court (FDAC) model and was instrumental in the development of a court-based assessment service (CBAS), offering families going through the family court an excellent service of assessment and intervention. Coventry’s FDAC started in 2015 and Beverley took on the role of FDAC project manager alongside her day job as Manager of CBAS and the Family Time (contact) Service. She worked tirelessly with the partner agencies, including the judiciary, public health, substance misuse services, voluntary agencies and the lived recovery experience community, to ensure FDAC got off the ground.

Whilst in Coventry Beverley also led on developing and implementing the Early FDAC model, a pilot intervention working with pregnant mothers who had a child previously removed. Elements of the Early FDAC model have now been implemented in other FDAC teams and more recently, Beverley, with colleagues from Early FDAC, directly contributed to the development of a new perinatal intervention for recurrent parents, The Daisy Model, which is currently attracting national and international interest from those working within infant mental health. Beverley joined the FDAC partnership between 2019 and 2021, supporting the establishment of FDACs in Newcastle, Birmingham and Manchester. At this time she also undertook the full scale implementation of the Black Country FDAC, a Tri-borough initiative as part of her work on Walsall MBC’s children’s social care transformation programme. She also led on the adoption of mentalisation based interventions in the Adolescent service, Youth Justice and residential care via the Adoption of the AMBIT approach.

Beverley was appointed as the Associate Director for Practice and Impact at Nuffield Family Justice Observatory in May 2020 and has continued her pioneering and bold leadership, bringing together collaborations of experts, lived experience and young people to challenge the business as usual. She leads on the Nuffield Family Justices’ Observatory Equalities programme and is a founder of the Anti-Racist Family Justice network. In 2022 she was appointed to the expert advisory board for the Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood and, in 2023, she was appointed a Trustee of Kinship – the charity for Kinship carers