Judy Hardman

Judy is a qualified social worker with over 45 years’ experience including frontline practice, practice improvement, training and management positions.

She began her social work career In Liverpool where she worked as an unqualified social worker and a research assistant in a voluntary organisation, before moving to undertake her social work qualifying course at Leicester University. She remained in the Midlands where she held various frontline roles with local authorities before moving into management.

Judy has managed a variety of local authority children’s social work teams including an “edge of care” team, adoption service, youth offending, and leaving care. She developed skills in service re-design and project management, such as designing and delivering assessment centres for residential social workers and managers as part of a restructure of children’s residential services, leading on the disaggregation of services as part of Local Government Reorganisation, setting up a Youth Offending Team, and working as Programme Manager of Leicester Children’s Fund.

She subsequently spent ten years in Action for Children, a national charity, managing projects in the East and West Midlands. These projects were responsible for delivering Children’s Centre services, young carers projects and Family Intervention Teams.

Over the last 12 years Judy has worked on an interim basis as a case file auditor and quality assurance advisor in Cornwall, Cambridgeshire, Leicester City, Redbridge and, most recently, Hull. In this capacity she has worked alongside managers and frontline staff, observing practice and examining written records, to identify areas for development and suggest improvement actions. She has also undertaken supervision audits which involved observing supervision practice. Judy is an accredited safeguarding peer reviewer with the Local Government Association and has participated in reviews of local authority practice in several different areas including Sandwell, Sunderland, Teesside, Herefordshire, Liverpool and Newcastle.

Judy regularly delivers practice workshops to local authority social workers on subjects such as analysis and critical thinking in assessment, identifying and responding to neglect, assessing parental capacity to change and developing professional curiosity.  She has also worked with local authorities to design and deliver customised learning packages. She is committed to working from an evidence-informed standpoint. She also delivered safeguarding training to school staff for a period of five years. Feedback from delegates consistently describe Judy as engaging, knowledgeable and clear in applying theory to practice.

Judy’s extensive experience of managing services and workers, combined with her recent experience in practice improvement roles, has provided her with a sound understanding of what good practice looks like. Her focus, in her training and also in feedback following audits and practice observations, has always been to support frontline staff to build on their strengths in order to develop their practice.

Professional Qualifications

Judy is a registered social worker with Social Work England and a member of BASW. She holds a BSc in Sociology and Social Administration, a Certificate of Qualification in Social Work and an MA (Social Work). She also has a Masters in Business Administration.