Meet our Trainers

Fiona is a family welfare conference coordinator with more than twenty years of experience working with children, youth, women and families in both statutory and voluntary sector agencies.

Fiona has worked in family welfare conference coordination since 2000 in: London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham Youth Offending Service (UK), Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea Child & Family Social Work (UK), and Barnardos (Ireland). In addition, Fiona worked with children and young people for eight years with Women’s Aid Federation of England.

In all the above settings Fiona has experience of:

• Working with children in need of support, children in need of protection, children in care, accommodated children and children at risk of offending
• Identifying, recording and reporting child protection and welfare issues
• Child protection in the context of domestic abuse
• Working in, or closely with, social work services
• Contributing to practice guidance
• Continuously updated training in child protection

Fiona has a B.A. Honours humanities degree and a post graduate certificate in Youth Justice as well as training in issues of equality and diversity; assessing criminogenic risk of offending in children and young people, parenting, restorative conferencing, project management and evaluation.

Fiona is a member of Barnardos child protection training panel. Fiona has worked in Barnardos for the past five years, where she continues to deliver family welfare conferences.

Leon is a fully qualified social care worker with an MA in Child, Family and Community Studies.  She has extensive experience of the residential social care area as part of the Crisis Intervention Service working with out-of-home young people and their families from the age of 12 to 18 years. Prior to this she worked in family support and in the disability sector.

During this work Leon has developed practice-based expertise on various issues that contribute to children and their families coming into contact with services such as social work services, homeless services and mental health services.  These issues include addiction, challenging behaviour and issues relating to the complex area of child protection.

Leon has worked in Tusla Child and Family Agency (formerly children and families in the HSE) for the last fifteen years. In recent years, Leon has become an independent trainer and consultant in the social care sector and has provided training and consultancy services for organisations such as Orchard Children Services, The Essential Organisation, Barnardos and Connexions Consultancy. 

Mandy Nordell is a general and paediatric nurse by profession. Mandy has been working solely in the area of child safeguarding and protection for the past 16 years, originally as a Children First training officer and then as the safeguarding manager for a large charity.

Mandy’s experience includes: policy development, training needs analysis, training content development and training delivery, designated liaison person case management, serious incident case management, best practice in creating safe environments for children and management of garda vetting processes. Her experience ranges across the statutory and voluntary sectors and across care groups,  early years, youth work, education, and in adult services for vulnerable adults. 

Mandy holds an MSc in Child Protection and Welfare from Trinity College Dublin, has trained with Tony Morrison to deliver ‘Supervision in Social Care’ programmes, and has provided one-to-one supervision and case management in a variety of contexts.