Claire Cameron is the UK’s first Professor of Social Pedagogy, and is based at Thomas Coram Research Unit, UCL Social Research Institute, University College London. Claire began her career in residential care and, after qualifying as a social worker in 1987, in social work until 1992. Since then she has been a researcher specialising in studies of the children’s workforce, early childhood care and education, looked after children and young people, care leavers, and families in areas of social deprivation.

She is particularly interested in the intersection of care and education and in the education of children in care and care leavers. Much of her work is cross-national and has a long standing interest in social pedagogy. She has been involved in studies of the potential for, and impact of, social pedagogy in the UK since 2000, and ran the Care Matters government funded pilot programme exploring social pedagogy in residential care (2008-2011). She developed and led the first UK MA Social Pedagogy and supervises PhD students in the field of social pedagogy. She co-edited (with Peter Moss) Social Pedagogy and Working with Children and Young People: Where Care and Education Meet (2011, JKP), one of the first English language volumes introducing social pedagogy.  She was project manager of the Scaling up Social Pedagogy project behind SPPA (2016-2019) and is co-editor of the I

nternational Journal of Social Pedagogy.