About Rosemary

Rosemary Kew has over 25 years of extensive experience working with adults, children and their families covering a range of disabilities including learning difficulties, mental health, sensory, physical needs. Rosemary's roles have been across all sectors private, voluntary and public. She strongly believes in the importance of allowing everyone to be known and recognised for their worth, and valued and respected for who they really are. She promotes this belief throughout everything she does.

During this time Rosemary has successfully set up and established 3 different 'needs led' services all of them based on Person Centred principles, even though initially she didn't know that it was called Person Centred, it just seemed the most natural, logical and sensible approach to her i.e. treating people as people and capitalising on their strengths and interests to help them overcome any difficulties they might have. In addition to this she also set up and successfully chaired a charity and support group.

Since 2014 Rosemary has been working as an associate of the Council for Disabled Children mainly delivering training and consultancy on C&FA 2014 to those providing support services to families of children with SEND.From September 1999 until March 2011, Rosemary was the Parent Partnership Service (PPS) Co-ordinator for the London Borough of Havering, where she set up and managed the service to provide support to parents of children with special educational needs and disabilities.

During this period she chaired the London Region for PPS for 6 years and was vice chair of the National Association for Parent Partnership Staff (Napps). This meant that Rosemary was very proactive working on several regional and national projects including the national evaluation of PPS, editorial board of the PPS Practice Guide and in 2009 contributed to the very successful DfES Achievement for All initiative.

During Rosemary's work in the field of PPS she became an experienced mediator and successfully incorporated a Solution Focussed approach to problem solving and adopted it as her service ethos. She is known for using an innovative approach in developing and delivering training, applicable to professionals, parents (or students at UEL) and also arranged information sessions for parents on key issues. Rosemary has worked extensively (and passionately) at a strategic level to improve systems and transform services to achieve better outcomes for children, young people and their families. She has also written and produced over 25 information leaflets (translating complex information into plain English) for parents.

While working as a mental health advocate for a local charity in 1998, Rosemary designed, wrote and produced an information pack which was then adopted by all the hospital wards (across 3 trusts) regarding the cultural and religious requirements, including death rites, for patients from different backgrounds. She was also a lead contributor to the development of a play which was performed to all staff across the 3 trusts to raise awareness of the range of issues the changing population were having to face and how the information pack could assist staff in promoting a positive experience for all. This resulted in the hosting health trust in 1999, receiving 2 National British Diversity Awards.

Prior to working in mental health Rosemary worked as a Residential Social Worker with adults with learning difficulties and challenging behaviour, she then became their Day-Care Officer. This required her to set up and co-ordinate individual day care packages for the 16 residents. This was her first opportunity to lead on incorporating a Person Centred approach (without knowing what it was called), including matching staff (she found out their strengths and interests first) as keyworkers to residents with similar interests.

Since going freelance in the spring of 2011, Rosemary has successfully adapted the Edexcel Accredited SEN Casework Award making it applicable for Parent Partnership Staff (PPS). To do this she has written the script on how this can be achieved across the 3 different levels (2,3 and 4) providing examples of how PPS work can be applied to the existing criteria.

Rosemary has also undertaken 2 independent reviews of Parent Partnership Services to assist them in becoming fully compliant across all 34 targets that they have to deliver on.

Rosemary has developed Voice-clouds by combining what she has learned, developed and practised over the past 20 years. This technique initially evolved from the need to increase parents' (customer) active involvement from the outset of the Special Educational Needs statementing process and to enable parents to make a meaningful contribution that would be seen as being of equal value alongside the professional reports that were being requested by their local authority. Parents liked it because they could clearly recognise their contribution in the final document and it reflected characteristics of their son or daughter that ordinarily may have not been available, as well as successful strategies the parents had discovered worked for them. Parents also felt it was a positive and refreshing experience due to its different nature and focus. Professionals liked it because it presented succinct additional valid information, usually no more than 2 sides of A4. Rosemary managed to achieve 98% participation.

Rosemary can provide innovative and professional training, advice and support and is able to deliver bespoke training on using Voice-clouds and/or developing or increasing client or service user (any client group) participation. She also provides training on how to develop services using person centred and/or solution focussed approaches, to large or small organisations in the statutory, private and voluntary sectors. Please phone or email Rosemary for an initial chat to discuss your needs. Guaranteed no hard sell but Rosemary is very passionate and enthusiastic about her work as she knows and believes in the difference it can make.

Her delivery style has been described as friendly, thought provoking and inspirational. Participants (professionals, parents and service users) have always given very positive feedback.