About
Phil Spencer is a UK-based social worker who has extensive experience in safeguarding children and young people in the UK and internationally. Phil's particular expertise is safeguarding children and young people on the move: unaccompanied and separated young people, child victims of trafficking and child refugees.
Phil has worked in child safeguarding in a variety of statutory and non-statutory roles since 2015. In addition to his Independent Social Work and Consultancy work he is currently the International Safeguarding and Protection Manager at a children's refugee charity.
Areas of expertise
Refugee Family Reunification
Phil has been primarily working on family reunification for unaccompanied children for more than four years and is one of the leading social work experts of family reunification for children in the UK and across Europe.
Phil has produced over 100 best interest assessment reports in family reunification cases and acted as an expert witness in family reunification court cases in the UK, France and Italy.
Skills and experience
Direct practice
Phil has many years of experience working directly with vulnerable children including young people in custody, detention and child victims of trafficking, not only in the UK but around the world. Phil has always continued direct work alongside his training, management and consulting responsibilities.
Independent social work and expert witness reports
Phil has been producing social work reports for UK courts since 2016. This has included pre-sentence reports for youth and crown courts, social work reports for family courts, expert trafficking reports for asylum tribunals and best interests assessments for family reunion applications.
Delivering training
Phil has been training professionals in safeguarding and child protection since 2018, both online and in person. Between 2019-2022 Phil trained several thousand professionals in safeguarding child victims of trafficking and unaccompanied children including social workers, police officers, foster carers and others. Most of this training was for professionals in the UK, however Phil also trained professionals in a variety of countries including Vietnam, Malta and Türkiye amongst others.
In his current role Phil continues to train professionals in a number of countries including Greece, France and Poland on safeguarding refugee and migrant children.
Consultation and supervision
Phil has several years experience in the UK and internationally supporting NGOs working with vulnerable children developing their safeguarding knowledge, policies, processes and practice.
As well as training professionals, this has also included providing supervision to staff to support them in assessing risk and responding to harm and abuse.
Professional qualifications and education
Social Worker, Registered with Social Work England
Registration number: SW112635
British Association of Social Workers (BASW)
Higher Education
MSc Social Work (Research, Policy and Practice)
University of Bedfordshire, 2016-2017
Postgraduate Diploma in Social Work
University of Bedfordshire, 2015-2016
MSc in Labour, Social Movements and Development
SOAS, University of London, 2014-2015
BA in International Development and Economics
University of East Anglia (UEA), 2011-2014
Professional memberships