Biography:

Founder Director of the Institute, Bryan Williams has been Professor of Social Work at Dundee University since 1989. He moved into this post haviing chaired the cross-university group that bid successfully for core funding from the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council and the Scottish Executive. Immediately prior to that, he chaired the group which produced the Standards in Social Work Education to underpin development of the new honours degree in Scotland. This work built on the 2000 Academic Benchmark produced by a UK group of social work academics that Bryan also chaired. He was founder Head of the Department of Social Work at Dundee and Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Education and Social Work, responsible principally for academic standards and quality assurance in teacher training, community education and social work.

An academic since 1976, Bryan's practice background is in youth justice and criminal justice and he worked as a Probation Officer in Inner London and Gloucestershire prior to moving to Scotland. His research has largely been in this field but he has also published work in the fields of computer applications in direct support and therapy, professional ethics and social work education. He has been active in the voluntary sector and was National Chair of SACRO from 1990 to 1993.

Bryan is a Council Member of the Scottish Social Services Council, as he was of the predecessor body - the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work. He is currently also a member of a number of national committees addressing agendas in the education, training and service development areas and is chair of the Practice Learning Implementation Group. Bryan was National Chair of the Association of Professors of Social Work from 1994 to 1998 and was awarded the OBE in 2003 for services to social work education.

Bryan's vision of the Institute is of a dynamic, responsive and reflective organisation working in effective collaboration with employers in all sectors, with those who use social services, informal carers and other key professionals to improve service standards. Meeting the needs of social services organisations and, more importantly, the proper expectations of service users, within rapidly changing demographic, professional and educational contexts, is a challenging task but one that he considers the Institute will help to meet. He believes that the Institute should be judged ultimately not on the ideas it develops but on the sustainable improvements in professional education and practice that to which it gives rise.

Full staff list