About
Founded in
2007 by Rebecca Carr-Hopkins, we are a team of highly qualified,
experienced and trusted professionals. Our expert knowledge of adult and
child attachment is frequently called on by the family courts in the UK
and Ireland. We deliver innovative and fun training programmes and
offer interventions to families that are supportive and empowering.
Founded in 2007 by Rebecca Carr-Hopkins, we are a team of highly qualified, experienced and trusted professionals. Our expert knowledge of adult and child attachment is frequently called on by the family courts in the UK and Ireland. We deliver innovative and fun training programmes and offer interventions to families that are supportive and empowering.
Rebecca Carr-Hopkins
Founder
Rebecca qualified as a social worker in 1996, and has over thirty years experience of working with children and families. She has worked independently since 2007 and has substantial experience of providing expert opinion to the family courts in respect of risk and parenting issues. She is one of the UK’s best trained experts in attachment with research level coder reliability in numerous methods for formally assessing attachment. She is also authorised to teach a range of the developmentally sequenced attachment assessments tied to the Dynamic Maturational Model (DMM) of Attachment and Adaptation, including the Infant CARE-Index, the Infant Strange Situation Procedure, the School-age Assessment of Attachment and the Adult Attachment Interview. She delivers these trainings locally, nationally and internationally.
Alongside this specialist training, she frequently delivers introductory training on attachment to a social care audience. She also delivers training on parenting capacity assessments, supervision, direct work with children, thresholds and court skills for social workers. She is a trained Video Interaction Guidance (VIG) guider and supervisor and trained in other methods of interventions for families, including Development Dyadic Psychotherapy (DDP-Stage 1) and Watch Wait and Wonder.
Paul Teverson
Associate
Paul qualified as a social worker in 2010, and has over fifteen years experience of working with children and families. He has worked independently since 2017 providing expert opinion to the family courts on numerous occasions. He also works as a senior lecturer in Human Growth and Development in the Social Work department at the University of Brighton teaching on the Batchelors and Masters programmes and undertakes connected persons assessments. He has a specialist interest in attachment having completed training in Attachment and Psychopathology (2014) and the Adult Attachment Interview (2015). He has a high level of coder reliability, is a VIG practitioner (in training) and delivers group work and individual programmes with perpetrators of domestic abuse.
In addition, Paul is currently studying for his PGCE In Higher Education and has recently commenced further employment as a research associate on a privately funded project considering how to engage and work effectively with ‘hard to reach’ and ‘vulnerable’ young men. He is a director of ‘Making It Out’, a Community Interest Company that works with young offenders and prison leavers to engage them in design and making activities.
Paul delivers training on attachment, legal thresholds, working with perpetrators of sexual abuse, child sexual abuse and harmful sexual behaviour in children.
Helen Johnson
Associate
Helen qualified as a social worker in 1999, and has over thirty years experience of working with children and families. She has worked independently since 2009 and has extensive experience of undertaking specialised risk, parenting and sibling assessments; providing expert opinion in the family courts; planning and providing therapeutic interventions to children and families in adoptive, birth family and foster care setting and providing consultancy and supervision services to a variety of multi-agency professionals. She is known for providing insightful and rigorous assessments and enabling and empowering interventions in a reliable and timely manner.
Helen is also an independent trainer offering a variety of courses to a social care audience and to parents and foster carers. Topics include attachment; planning for permanency, sibling relationship assessments and the impact of developmental trauma on mind, brain and body.
She is passionate about the use of evidenced based, well-validated tools for assessment and interventions as a means of providing more objective robust understandings and supporting families. Helen is trained in a range of the developmentally sequenced attachment assessments tied to the Dynamic Maturational Model (DMM) of Attachment and Adaptation, including the Infant Strange Situation Procedure, the Pre-School Assessment of Attachment, the School Age-Assessment of Attachment and the Adult Attachment Interview. She is also trained in various methods of intervention including Video Interactive Guidance [Level 2], Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy [Level 1] and Theraplay [Level 1].
Emma Keogh
Associate
Emma qualified as a social worker in 2011 in the Republic of Ireland. She worked for 3 years in Ireland before moving to England in 2014. Prior to this, she worked as a social care worker in numerous residential units for children including high support and secure units. Emma’s experience includes child protection and safeguarding as well as completing attachment assessments and therapeutic work with vulnerable young person’s team in a CAMHS team.
Emma graduated from the University of Roehampton in 2016 with a Masters in Attachment Studies with Distinction. She is trained to administer numerous attachment assessment procedures including the Infant CARE-Index, Pre-school Assessment of Attachment, School-age Assessment of Attachment, Child Attachment and Play assessment and the Adult Attachment Interview. She is working towards achieving reliability in a number of these measures.
Emma has extensive experience of court work in both England and Ireland. She has worked independently since 2016 completing fostering assessments and parenting capacity assessments. She is committed to continuous professional development and has undertaken various training courses in relation to child development, trauma, mental health, domestic abuse and sensory and therapeutic interventions. Emma is Level one Theraplay trained and has completed training in Dialectical Behaviour Therapy. Emma has also completed Attachment theory in Clinical Practice training at the Bowlby centre.
Paula Pettit
Associate
Paula qualified in 2005 with an MA in Social Work (Distinction) after completing a Degree in Psychology (2001). She worked in front-line child protection teams for eighteen years including several years at SWIFT Specialist Family Service, where she specialised in domestic abuse and attachment. She has worked independently since 2021 and has extensive experience of undertaking specialised risk and parenting assessments, kinship assessments, fostering assessments and providing expert opinion in the family courts. She is known for providing creative and insightful assessments and being empathic and fair in her decision making.
Paula is trained to administer numerous attachment assessment procedures including the Infant CARE-Index, Pre-school Assessment of Attachment, School-age Assessment of Attachment and the Adult Attachment Interview. She is an accredited VIG (Video Interaction Guidance Practitioner and is PAMs Trained (for assessing parents with learning disabilities and other vulnerabilities).
Paula has delivered workshops on domestic abuse (Sussex University, 2020, SWIFT Conference, 2019) and will present at the 2023 Justice Board Review (Kinship Care). She is committed to continuous professional development and has undertaken various training courses in relation to trauma, mental health, domestic abuse, and therapeutic parenting. She is starting her Level 3 counselling in September 2023.
