About Dr Diane Simpson
I am a registered social worker with Social Work England (SW SW62215) and have extensive social work experience, mainly in children's services. I joined the University of Sunderland in September 2020.
I qualified as a social worker in 1985 and initially worked in adult care (hospital setting) for Manchester City Council. In 1988, I moved to a children's (adolescent) team, working in child protection and youth justice. Between 1990-1992, I worked for Cornwall County Council in children's safeguarding teams, where I first became a practice educator offering social work student placements. In 1992, I moved to NSPCC Lincolnshire in a team providing complex assessment and therapeutic work. NSPCC Lincolnshire also provided work for children and young people with harmful sexual behaviours and between 2002 and 2004, I was seconded to the post of Lincolnshire Co-ordinator for Children and Young People with Harmful Sexual Behaviours. This post focused on supporting multi-agency staff to assess and support children/young people. My MA dissertation (2000) examined factors that promoted or blocked staff from working with children and young people with harmful sexual behaviours.
In 2004, I moved to a training and development post with Lincolnshire County Council and was a training officer for children's services. In 2006, I became a senior lecturer in social work at the University of Lincoln and worked there until 2016 when I moved to take up a senior lecturer post in social work at Teesside University. From 2018-2020, I was a social work placements co-ordinator at Teesside University, working with partner agencies to provide high-quality social work placements.
While at Teesside University, I developed a social work undergraduate buddying scheme. This was a co-produced project with undergraduate students based on a theoretical basis of Student as Producer and Communities of Practice. In 2019-20, I successfully obtained internal funding for a student as researcher project and worked with four undergraduate social work students to evaluate the buddying scheme and we have since had a journal article published on these findings.
Building on the buddying scheme from Teesside University, in 2022-2023 with Cally Bleasby, Jamie Scorer, Phil Watson, and Kristy Regan, we developed a peer mentoring scheme at the University of Sunderland and were successful in obtaining a Vice Chancellor's Team Teaching Award to support this initiative.
I teach BA (Hons) Social Work (Integrated Degree Apprenticeship) and MA Social Work. I am also involved in doctoral supervision.
Teaching and supervision
I teach theories and models of social work practice and children's law on MA Social Work. I also teach The Social Work Process and the Research for Social Work Practice modules on the Social Work apprenticeship. I am Deputy Programme Leader for the Social Work Apprenticeship. I'm also involved in supervising BA (Hons) Social Work dissertations and I'm a member of two PhD supervision teams.
Interests
My research interests are broad and varied. My early projects and outputs were concerned mainly with the co-construction of knowledge and research with students (e.g., evaluating the social work degree; students as mentors; developing a conceptual model for co-production). I have a number of outputs and conference presentations on collaborating with student researchers. Additionally, I have written about, and been involved with projects and undertaken conference presentations on pedagogical practice (e.g., creating open educational resources, and developing an e-portfolio). I have also undertaken research about social work placements leading to co-authored journal articles and a book. In 2011, I was involved in a scoping study funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to examine the concept of communities for looked after children.
My doctoral thesis “Being and Becoming a Social Work Academic: Negotiating Transitions and Identities” examined the experiences of social work practitioners who become social work academics, exploring transition experiences and the plurality of academic identities. My thesis used a Foucauldian theoretical framework, drawing upon and merging, the concepts of disciplinary power, technologies of self, subject positions, and discourses. My thesis supports, extends, and challenges Foucault’s work and I have a forthcoming journal article on the carcerality of social work education. I have presented papers on my doctoral work at the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) annual conference (2014 and 2015).
In 2018-19, I was involved in a project with Professor Dorothy Newbury-Birch funded by Public Health England to evaluate the impact of the Prevention Concordat for Better Mental Health and obtained honorary researcher status with Public Health England. While at Teesside University, I developed a social work buddying scheme that was co-produced with students and has expanded to include newly qualified social workers in the Tees Valley as mentors for final-year students. In 2019-20, I obtained and led a student researcher project that investigated the undergraduate social work buddying scheme at Teesside University.
I have been involved in another collaborative project with Professor Newbury-Birch and colleagues from Teesside University which is funded by NIHR (National Institute for Health Research). This project examines how to develop a memorandum of understanding into a research system between public health and universities in the Tees Valley region.
From April 2021-2022, I was joint Principal Investigator (with Professor Newbury-Birch, Teesside University) on an NIHR-ARC funded project: Developing policy and practice guidelines for working with young people aged 18 and under in relation to self-harm, suicide attempts, and deaths by suicide.
In 2021-2021, I was Principal Investigator on a community-funded project working with other members of the social work team (Dr Louise Harvey-Golding, Carrie Phillips and Julie Smiles) to explore the experiences of Eastern European women in the North East.
I am currently the Principal Investigator on a small-scale project funded by the university via UKRI PSF which will examine the role of the mentor on the social work apprenticeship. The project team are Sarah Beck, Julie Shaw, Vicki Ingham (Stockton on Tees Borough Council), Charlotte Roberts (Hartlepool Borough Council), and Stuart Brown (Sunderland City Council).
Research
My research interests are varied and include social work practice placements, teaching and learning, academic identities, and co-production with students and practitioners. Increasingly, with Professor Newbury-Birch (Teesside University), I have been involved with public health-related projects. My doctoral research (2016) examined the transition experiences and identities of social workers who become academics.
Please see my ORCID profile(opens in new tab).