Harry Ferguson

Senior Lecturer

Harry Ferguson is Senior Lecturer in social work at the Tavistock and Portman and Emeritus Professor of Social Work at the University of Birmingham. Harry came into social work in 1978, spent time in practice and then completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge. He has been a social work academic since 1990 and since 2000 has held professorial posts and spent his 35 years in social work education researching and theorising the nature of social work practice and relationships between practitioners and service users, by drawing upon a range of sociological and psychodynamic theories. He has carried out several major funded research projects, presented at hundreds of conferences and training events, published extensively and has been shown to be one of the most read and impactful social work academics in the world.

Harry has pioneered ethnographic research that gets close to practice by observing encounters between practitioners, children and families. This has produced new understandings of core practice issues, such as how children become invisible in child protection work, and the complexities of reflective practice. His journal papers on such matters have been read hundreds of thousands of times, and his books include Child Protection Practice (Palgrave, 2011). His new book, Making Child Protection Work, is the culmination of many years of research and engagement with practice and is all about the complex relationships between social workers, children and families and what is good helpful practice.