Nick is a social work practitioner-academic. This means that they combine research and practice in their career. Nick has written about the need to develop social work practitioner academic roles and to have better research literacy in social work, so that social workers and their managers understand research and can be better informed when they are commissioning and delivering services. Nick is funded by the National Institute of Health and Care Research, as a Doctoral Local Authority Fellow.
Nick is working with people affected by adoption (adoptees, birth family members, adopters) to understand what makes a good quality of life for English adoptees aged 16-25. This means thinking about the social experience of adoptees, including preventable social harms that adoptees experience.
Nick qualified as a social worker in 2007 and worked as a children and families social worker in Birmingham and Sheffield for 10 years, before becoming involved in post adoption support for people affected by child adoption. They joined the Department of Sociological Studies at University of Sheffield in 2020 as a University Teacher in social work. This was part time, alongside their “day job” as a practising social worker in post-adoption support. Nick applied for funding from the National Institute of Health and Care Research to complete an MA in Social Research at the Sheffield Methods Institute, and after this they went on to secure funding for their PhD project. Nick is an active part of the department, a UCU rep, and a member of the Centre for Care.
Research interests
Nick is interested in user-led research, social harms, and critical and radical social work research. Nick uses mixed methods, including participatory methods and statistical analysis using the programming language R.
In their PhD project, Nick is developing a quality of life measure, starting from the experiences of people affected by adoption. Social workers will be able to use this measure to help them understand and better support adoptees. Researchers will also be able to use it to understand what is associated with good quality of life, and to measure the impact of interventions aimed at improving adoptee outcomes.
Nick has presented papers at the European Conference for Social Work Research in Amsterdam and Milan, on practitioner research and adoption.
Research Groups
Nick is supervised by Dr Michaela Rogers (Social Work), Dr Anju Devianee Keetharuth (Sheffield Centre for Health and Related Research) and Dr Mark Taylor (Sheffield Methods Institute). They are involved in the Centre for Care and iHuman, although their research is interdisciplinary and spans a number of research groups.
Grants
- NIHR Pre-Doctoral Local Authority Fellowship 2021/22
- National Institute of Health and Care Research Doctoral Local Authority Fellowship 2023/26
Teaching
Nick has convened and taught on modules on the MA in Social Work and in the Continuous Professional Development programme – the MA in Advanced Professional Practice. Nick developed the Advanced Contextual Safeguarding With Children module and was involved in redeveloping an Out of Home Care module for experienced post-qualifying social workers. In 2019, they gained Higher Education Academy Fellowship status and developed innovative social work group supervision methods that have been taken up regionally.
Nick has given a number of masterclasses on Peer Reflective Supervision and a masterclass on Kinship Care for social workers in South Yorkshire.
Professional Activities
Nick is a volunteer with Adopteens, which is a project for adoptees run by PAC-UK. Nick supports their youth council, which regularly informs adoption policy and practice via their voice work. Nick has also worked alongside Sheffield City Council’s Voice and Influence workers, including training and working with them as co-researchers, facilitating focus groups.
Publications
- Burke, N. (2025) ‘Making Connections with Vulnerable Children & Families: Creative Tools & Resources for Practice: Jan Horwath, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 256 pp., $39.95 (Paperback), ISBN: 9781787757943’, Practice, pp. 1–3. doi: 10.1080/09503153.2025.2511018
- Ashworth, C. and Burke, N. (2023) ‘Striking Ethical Balances: The Contribution of ‘Insider’ Practitioner–Academic Social Work Research in England’, The British Journal of Social Work. doi: 10.1093/bjsw/bcad171
- Burke, N. (2020) ‘The Failure of Social Work to Respond to Covid-19’, SW2020-21 Covid-19 magazine