Fiona Walker

BA
Principal Officer, Children's Services
f.walker@nfer.ac.uk
+44 (0)1753 637319

Fiona Walker is the Principal Officer, Children’s Services. She has a BA (hons) degree in Social Policy from the Open University.

Fiona joined NFER in April 2007 and leads and co-ordinates the Foundation’s work on Children’s Services.

Prior experience and professional background

Fiona started work in the Children’s Service arena in 1996 where she worked for Westminster Children’s Society, managing Community Childcare Centres in a military barracks and on the site of a community school in partnership with social services.

In 2002 Fiona took up the management of a family resource centre for the Family Welfare Association combining her experience of early years work with a more varied role to include managing services for children 0-19 years, family support and support to the wider community.

In 2004 Fiona became the Children’s Fund Programme Manager for Slough Borough Council, monitoring and evaluating early intervention and preventative services for children 5-13 years and their families. Whilst working for the Local Authority Fiona also developed her interest in children and young people’s participation, leading on this area for the authority and the wider Children’s Trust. She also supported the role out of the Common Assessment Framework, working with the children’s services integration officer to roll out an extensive CAF training programme across the Children’s Trust.

Since joining the NFER, Fiona has directed sponsored work for local authorities including children and young people’s attitudes, perceptions and behaviours surveys used to inform local authority and children’s trust planning and commissioning. She is also co-director on the DCSF sponsored Tellus4 survey and is working with colleagues on the development of standardised pupil and parent surveys to support school and local authority level planning.

Fiona’s previous role as a CAF trainer has led to her involvement in the NFERs work as part of the Local Authority Research Consortium (LARC) who have been investigating the early impact of integrated children’s services and in particular looking in more detail at how the CAF process supports the achievement of better outcomes for children and young people and the key factors that promote the effectiveness of CAF in different contexts.