Rate My Professor Jonathan Scourfield

Professor Jonathan Scourfield is Professor of Social Work in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, where he began his academic career in 1996 as a tutorial fellow and progressed through lecturer (1999-2005), senior lecturer (2005-2009), reader (2009-2011), to professor since 2011. He holds qualifications including DipSW and PhD from Cardiff University on the construction of gender in child protection work, a history degree from Cambridge University, and teacher training in London. Before academia, he worked as a secondary school teacher, group worker in a therapeutic community, and probation officer, and remains a registered social worker with Social Care Wales. From January 2018 to May 2021, he was seconded to the Welsh Government as specialist policy adviser to the Minister for social care. He currently serves as Deputy Director of CASCADE, the Children’s Social Care Research and Development Centre, Deputy Director of the National Centre for Suicide Prevention and Self-harm Research, and executive member of the Centre for Adult Social Care Research. A Senior Research Leader with Health and Care Research Wales (2022-2028), he is a Fellow of the Joint University Social Work Association, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and trustee of the Family Rights Group. During 2026-2027, he holds a visiting professorship at Lund University, Sweden. He is Welsh-speaking, a media commentator, and available for postgraduate supervision.

Scourfield’s research focuses on social care inequalities in child welfare and adult care by gender, deprivation, and ethnicity; evaluations and systematic reviews of children’s social care; engaging fathers and men in child protection; social work education including fast-track programmes; research capacity-building in social work doctorates and quantitative methods; and the social context of suicide and self-harm, such as in men, clusters, social media impacts on youth, and methodological approaches. Key publications include books Gender and Child Protection (2003), Children, Place and Identity (2006), Muslim Childhood: Religious Nurture in a European Context (2013, editor), Social Work: A Very Short Introduction (2015, with Sally Holland), and highly cited papers such as Engaging fathers in child welfare services (2012, 319 citations), Inequalities in English child protection practice under austerity (2018, 210 citations), and Machine classification and analysis of suicide-related communication on Twitter (2015, 360 citations). Ranked 41st among the world’s top 100 social work researchers in 2023, he sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Social Work, ESRC Peer Review College, NIHR Research Programme for Social Care funding committee, and Welsh National Office for Care and Support Strategic Advisory Group.