About Turning Corners

Karina has over 30 years experience in Adult and Children’s Social Care both as a front line manager for family support where her main passion was to ensure the ‘voice of the child’ and ‘adult at risk’ was present through every planning and decision made and, in more recent years, in Adult and Children’s Workforce Development.

Karina’s enthusiasm for training and development is evident in her project lead on child protection, child development and assessment, parenting assessment as well as involvement in adult and children practice forums, serious case reviews and implementation of lessons learnt into training.

Not only does Karina have experience of delivering a wide range of training in such subjects as attachment and the impact of trauma, child sexual exploitation, fostering and adoption, dementia awareness and adult and children’s mental health, she also has commissioned, managed delivery and ensured quality of training delivered by other facilitators. Underpinning everything Karina has written, delivered and commissioned has been with a person centred approach.

Karina has a passion for workforce development that is backed by a lifelong career in local authority adult and children’s social care and this is evident in her training delivery.

Karina is also an approved Foster Carer which allowed her to not only give a children’s specialist practitioners perspective to training but a Foster Carers as well. However, along with her family, they made the decision to no longer foster and this ended this in 2017.

Qualifications include Child Psychology where Attachment was an area Karina specialised in and managing a Local Authority Parenting Assessment team where she was able to use this specialised knowledge in guiding staff to ensure assessment of secure or insecure attachment was identified.

Karina continues this knowledge of psychology in her current practice as an adult and child counsellor where she is able to support children, young people and adults to make sense of difficult thoughts and feelings and give strategies for managing them. Karina is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Therapeutic Parenting and Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) trained and currently practices this in her counselling.

In January 2019, Karina had the privilege to take up a role as a Trustee for Silito Housing which is a supported housing charity in Stoke on Trent that supports people with low level learning difficulties and low level physical disabilities with only a little help to live independently.

In August 2020 Karina completed her Advanced Family Trauma Therapist training with the Family Trauma Institsute earning her recognition as a Family Systems Trauma Advanced Trained Clinician.

At present Karina is a National Crime Agency Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Ambassador; this reflects her continued commitment to ensuring our most vulnerable young people are protected from harm and she nationally train professionals and parents and carers with the most updated information and statistics.

CEOP helps any child or young person under the age of 18 who is being pressured, forced or tricked into taking part in sexual activity of any kind. This can be something that has taken place either online or in ‘the real world’, or both. The CEOP Safety Centre has clear information and advice on what can be reported to CEOP, the reporting process and what will happen if you do decide to make a report. You can visit the CEOP Safety Centre and make a report directly to CEOP by clicking the Click CEOP button.

If you are experiencing online bullying or something else online has worried you please speak to an adult you trust, or you can talk to Childline at any time on 0800 1111 or at www.childline.org.uk.