Joanne Jackson has over 30 years’ experience of working with children and families. She holds the Diploma in Social Work and a Certificate in Higher Education from Greenwich University and a Practice Teachers Award from Christ Church University. She has worked in a statutory capacity as a Social Worker in child protection for 10 years with various Local Authorities. She has worked within Child and Adolescent Services since 2000, predominantly undertaking intensive parenting assessments and treatments of children and their families, preparing reports for the courts and appearing as an expert witness. Much of her court work has included assessing children’s emotional, behavioural, social functioning, parental capacity for change, and relationships of families where there have been extreme discord and inadequate parenting that have impacted upon child development.

Joanne was employed as a Family Therapist, at the Anna Freud Centre. During her time there she worked in the Specialist Trauma And Maltreatment Service (STAMS). A branch to her work included working with families with very serious and complex parental conflict and alienation, including contact and residence disputes.

She has been teaching in the field of family therapy since 2006 and currently is an academic tutor at The Prudence Skynner Couple & Family Clinic delivering teaching on their systemic family therapy course and at Institute of Family Therapy teaching.

Joanne’s current area of specialism is in working with children and families where there are serious and complex risks, emotional, behavioural and social functioning. Joanne works with individuals, couples and whole family systems in a way that enables family members to interact with their own dominant ideologies or discourses about what their life should be like. The focus of this work is enabling understanding to emerge through the process of making sense of behaviour as a relational communication pattern that gets played out in the relationships that people have around them. Her area of expertise is Parent Infant work, Attachment, Narrative Therapy, Mentalisation, working with parents with High Conflict, Parental Alienation and Contact and Residence Disputes. Joanne has a natural flair for finding strengths in people, particularly when they don’t see it in themselves. She has a belief that everyone has the ability to change and enabling people the opportunity to discover that is her mantra for work.