Dr Ruth Parkes

Ruth teaches across under-graduate and post-graduate Social Work courses and allocates student placements. She has a key role in developing relationships with local stakeholders and training social work practitioners. Her teaching role with students largely focuses on criminal justice, offending behaviour and developing skills for practice. Ruth is the disability lead for the school and is passionate about ensuring equal learning opportunities for all students. She is also the deputy lead for Youth and Justice in the University-wide trans-disciplinary Criminal Justice Partnership.

Ruth joined UCLan in October 2013 after working for the Probation Service for 11 years. As a Probation Officer in Greater Manchester and Cumbria, Ruth worked primarily with people sentenced to medium and long term custodial sentences for violent and sexual offences. Ruth’s main areas of expertise were the assessment and  supervision of men convicted of sexual offences, and her training specialisms were the use of assessment and information gathering tools such as ViSOR, (the Violent and Sex Offender Register) and formal report writing.