Professor of Child and Family Social Work; Director of CASCADE Centre for Children's Social Care Research and Development, Cardiff University

Donald is Professor of Child and Family Social Work at Cardiff University, where he is Director of the CASCADE Centre for Children’s Social Care Research Centre. CASCADE is one of the biggest Centres of its kind in the world, with over 50 staff, 35 PhD students and other affiliates. Donald is also Deputy Director of the new SCALE Centre for Social Care and AI Learning (established 2025), which has an exciting programme of work in this important new field. He is also the Founding Research Director of the Better Childhoods Centre – a major new £37 million Centre in Denmark aiming to improve services and outcomes for children under 7 through high quality evaluative research with professionals.

Donald enjoys setting things up… he also founded the Tilda Goldberg Centre at the University of Bedfordshire, was the founding Academic Director of the Frontline programme and the founding co-Director of the What Works Centre. He has led research projects or programmes with a combined worth of over £25 million and been co-investigator on projects worth over £45 million.

Donald’s primary research interests are what good practice is in children’s social care, what difference it makes to children and families, and how services can develop good practice. He is a leading expert on evaluative research, has carried out several studies evaluating complex whole system changes and has a sustained focus on directly observing practice. In recent books he has developed ideas about rights focused social work and the application of Motivational Interviewing to children’s services. He is currently focused on methodological and theoretical innovations for evaluative research; the application of AI into children’s services; new ways of understanding how and why social workers talk to parents in the ways that they do.