CORC Team

Kate is Head of Evidence-led Improvement at Anna Freud. She leads CORC’s research, informatics and service support teams in taking forward CORC’s mission: promoting the meaningful use of evidence to improve child and youth mental health and wellbeing. Her experience is in mental health and wellbeing measurement approaches, evaluation, development of outcome frameworks and needs assessment. 

Kate's background is in service development in a local authority context, and in particular applying data-driven approaches to embed a focus on outcomes. She has been active in improving service collaboration and coordination around community needs through her work across a range of public, voluntary and community sector bodies – in particular in regeneration contexts. Recently Kate has been exploring how evidence and feedback loops can improve the impact of self-care (non-professionally mediated approaches) in child and youth mental health, as well as continuing to improve CORC’s support to young people, commissioners, mental health practitioners and schools in making best use of evidence to improve outcomes.

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As Programme Manager for CORC, Nick works directly with members as well as on a range of projects in collaboration with CORC partner organisations. Nick joined CORC after working in schools, first as a teacher and then as head teacher of a large London primary school. Through his work with children he saw the importance of effective support for children’s mental health and wellbeing and worked with partner organisations to develop practice in school. He is particularly interested in the wellbeing of the most vulnerable children.

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Julian is Research Lead alongside Jenna Jacob at CORC and lecturer in evidence based child and adolescent mental health at UCL. Julian Edbrooke-Childs is also Head of Digital Development and Evaluation and Senior Research Fellow at the Evidence Based Practice Unit (EBPU). Julian’s research focuses on evidence based child and adolescent mental health, and includes projects which consider factors relating to person-centred care, shared decision making and evaluations of effective practice. Julian also leads on the management and evaluation of digital innovation grants for mobile health interventions.

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Jenna is Research Lead alongside Julian Edbrooke-Childs at CORC. Jenna’s research focuses on patient-centred care and outcome measurement, with a particular interest in goal setting and tracking in therapeutic settings. Jenna brings a wealth of experience of the practical aspects of outcome monitoring, including data spec development, measurement and data handling and analysis through a variety of roles held within CORC over the past decade. Jenna is particularly interested in the direct application of research to positively impact the lives of children with mental health and well-being difficulties.

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Ben is the lead of CORC Informatics, which supports CORC’s member services and central team in processing and managing large data sets efficiently. He has particular experience in the fields of data handling and information governance. Current work with partnerships of organisations in the health, education and social care sectors aims to link data sources to consider service user outcomes from different perspectives. Before joining CORC, Ben managed data collection and report preparation for the child and adolescent mental health services payment system project, which involved supporting 20 pilot sites across England on improving data quality. Ben has previously worked at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine on research into health policy implementation and commissioning.

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As Regional Officer for the Midlands and South West, Lee seeks to support organisations and services to develop their evidence based and outcome focused approach for service improvement. Lee developed his passion for this work supporting the mental health and well-being of children and young people over 12 years across voluntary and statutory sectors. This experience gave him a keen understanding of the needs of children, young people and their families and a commitment to putting them at the centre of all support for them. Lee is excited by the variety and diversity of work that takes place for children and young people and seeks to better understand, to demonstrate and to improve the effectiveness of this support.

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As Regional Improvement Officer, Rachael seeks to support organisations and services to develop their outcomes and evidence focused approach for service improvement in children’s mental health. Before CORC, Rachael worked as a teacher and a Head of Year in secondary schools. Throughout this work, she saw the importance of effective mental health and wellbeing support and worked to remove barriers to access for young people and their families. Rachael is excited to be working with organisations across the North West to deliver service improvements for children and young people. 

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Having worked in the finance, international and online direct marketing departments of a publishing company for several years, Georgina’s career took a step in a very different direction when she started in her previous role with national Social, Emotional and Mental Health (SEMH) education charity, called Engage In Their Future. The initial focus of her role on providing administrative support expanded significantly over time to include, amongst other things, event organisation and delivery, finance management, online support, creative and content development, and membership liaison.
 
Georgina is excited to be joining the CORC team and is looking forward to working collaboratively with schools in their efforts to encourage and nurture the good mental health and emotional wellbeing of their communities through the services, resources and projects provided by CORC and the Anna Freud Centre.
 
As CORC’s Membership and Development Officer, Georgina is keen to draw on her experience of contributing to different projects and building positive relationships with stakeholders in order to best support and engage CORC members. 

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As Communications and Marketing Officer, Chrissy leads on the development and delivery of all of CORC’s communications, ensuring members and the wider CORC network are informed about the best practice approaches, research findings, project collaborations, services and training – to support and inform the great work you do. Chrissy has many years' experience and spent her career planning and delivering a wide range of communication campaigns and events for high profile national and international organisations, always ensuring an understanding of the audience. Her interest in Marketing is based in a love of psychology and behaviour. 

Alongside this Chrissy has spent over 20 years undertaking various training in personal development, including NLP, Life Coaching, Steiner Wardorf Teaching Training and Psychodynamic Counselling. She is a member of BACP and works one-to-one with individuals to support their mental health. She continues to undertake a level 5 diploma in counselling for Children and Young People. She is passionate in contributing to the well being of children and families, and is delighted to combine her knowledge and experience.

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Navya Malik joined CORC as a Research Officer in 2022 upon completing her MSc in Developmental Psychology and Clinical Practice from the Anna Freud Centre and UCL. She came in with clinical and research experience, having worked as an assistant psychologist, ABA therapist, research assistant, research lead, and academic editor. Her research interests include the impact and treatment of neurodevelopmental disorders, particularly ADHD.

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Holly joined the team in May 2023, bringing her expertise in research, programming, and data analysis to the role of Research Officer - Data. Previously, she has worked in software development roles and as a research assistant at the University of Sheffield, where she gained experience in data collection, automated analysis, and report production. She has a strong background in analysing diverse datasets using R and Python. In her current position, Holly is responsible for dataset cleaning, validation, analysis and management, while also generating reports for CORC members and providing support for data analysis across various projects.

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Rachael joined CORC in August 2023 as Participation in Research Officer. Prior to this, she worked on various research projects supporting children in out-of-home care, including fostering, residential care, and internationally in domestic servitude. She is also a trained social worker. Rachael is passionate about making sure that everyone can get involved in research, including those who are often underserved or left behind in research. She is excited to support the involvement of children, young people, parents and carers in research and evaluation across CORC, and the Applied Research & Evaluation team.

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Anoushka joined the CORC team in February 2024, as a Research Officer. She previously served as a research assistant on another Anna Freud collaboration which evaluated the clinical efficacy and cost effectiveness of mentalization based treatment in children with mixed emotional and behavioural problems. She also comes from a clinical background, having held the position of assistant psychologist for the Mental Health Support Team in schools for the Enfield CAMHS practice during her MSc. placement.

She has the experience of undertaking quantitative and qualitative analyses, setting up and assisting with a large-scale randomised controlled superiority trial, and co-producing research materials with children, young people, and parents/carers. She is passionate about including under-represented young people, especially those form minoritised ethnic backgrounds in research, having written two qualitative dissertations on the subject.

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