Charlie Porter-Baker

Role

Charlie is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Work, Care and Community (SWCC), in the School of Social Sciences.

She is Course Leader for BA (Hons) Youth Worker Level 6 Integrated Degree Apprenticeship.

Charlie’s current responsibilities include course leadership, module development and placement supervision across degree and master’s level courses as well as being involved in an apprenticeship sub-committee group.

Career overview

Charlie found her passion for working with young people when completing a MA in youth and community work. During this time, she was involved in a range of Erasmus + projects focusing on European youth work which included bid writing, Youthpass, development of a journal, youth participation and sustainability. Since then, she has worked with young people in a variety of settings including centre-based youth work, detached youth work, semi-independent living and in residential children’s homes before starting her PhD. Since then, Charlie has lectured predominantly in youth work, working with young people more broadly and in aspects of criminology across a few universities, before joining NTU in 2020.

Charlie is open to collaborative work focusing on her research interests and can offer consultancy work as an external mentor and youth work practice consultant.

External activity

Charlie is one of the co-ordinators for an Erasmus + funded project between the UK, France, Poland, Türkiye and Cyprus, entitled the Protect Project. This project aims to promote an understanding of child sexual exploitation (CSE) and providing youth workers with training materials which will better equip them to work with CSE and related, overlapping issues such as criminal exploitation and grooming. Using training events hosted in partner countries, Protect Project will develop a trans-national toolkit based on the collaborative development activities of each training event held.

This toolkit is available on our website and will be updated throughout the three-year project to further educate youth workers and maintain good practice in working with CSE and related issues. It is free to access and use for the benefit of working with young people at: https://sites.gold.ac.uk/the-protect-project/

Alongside this, Charlie is currently an external examiner at the University of Bedfordshire for the MA Childhood, Youth and Family Studies where she covers modules including dimensions of childhood, youth and families, research methods, theories shaping public policy for children and young people, and young people, group offending and violent crime.