Katy Harris
Co-Host of ‘Bridging The Gap’, Founder of Mediation Matters Midlands and The London Mediation Company, Family Mediator, Advocate for Child-Inclusive Practice and Early Intervention
Katy Harris is a leading voice in family mediation, known for her innovative work embedding child-focused, trauma-informed approaches across the UK and beyond. She is the founder of Mediation Matters Midlands and The London Mediation Company, where she leads practice in family mediation, Child-Inclusive Mediation (CIM), and early intervention models that reduce conflict and protect children’s wellbeing.
Katy designs and delivers training programmes for mediators and professionals, and is the creator of Resolve, an international enrichment programme equipping young people with skills in negotiation, emotional regulation, and conflict resolution. She co-leads the Wellingborough Family Court Mediation Pilot, aligning mediation with court reform to create safer, more collaborative outcomes for separating families.
An international speaker and advocate, Katy collaborates with global partners to transform family justice, including co-hosting the Bridging the Gap conference. Her work blends lived experience, academic research, and frontline practice, driven by a passion for empowering families and young people to navigate conflict with dignity and clarity.
Day 1 - Professor Gigi Gutiérrez, Lucy Morrison-Childs & Katy Harris | Panel
Little Feelings, Big Systems: Emotional Education is a Justice Issue
Who it will interest
Education leaders and teachers, mediators, family lawyers, social workers, youth justice and early help practitioners, safeguarding professionals
What this session is about
This session explores how early emotional development, family instability and system responses shape later outcomes across education, safeguarding and justice.
In the first half, Katy Harris and Gigi Gutiérrez trace the pathway from early relational stress to adolescent exclusion and criminalisation. Katy examines how emotional regulation develops within relationships and how conflict, instability and chronic stress shape children’s behaviour. She explores how unmet needs are frequently misread by adults and institutions as defiance, intent or character rather than adaptation to pressure.
Gigi carries this forward into adolescence, showing how these early misinterpretations can harden over time. She examines how punitive school responses, exclusionary discipline and instability can accelerate marginalisation and contribute to what is often described as the school to prison pipeline. Drawing on her restorative justice and youth mediation work, she reframes accountability as something that must sit alongside regulation, repair and stability rather than punishment alone.
Together, they argue that emotional education is not a wellbeing extra but a justice intervention.
In the second half, Lucy Morrison Childs leads a practical exploration of what prevention looks like in delivery through the Resolve Enrichment Programme, supported by Katy. This applied section moves from theory to implementation, demonstrating how conflict literacy, emotional regulation and de escalation skills can be taught early before patterns solidify into exclusion, safeguarding intervention or court involvement.
Drawing on school-based work delivered internationally, including mediation training with students in under resourced communities in Texas, the speakers reflect on why schools need structured conflict education now more than ever. They outline how equipping young people with conflict de escalation skills strengthens resilience, improves school culture and reduces escalation across systems. They also explore how this work will continue to develop internationally, supporting the next generation with practical tools for communication, accountability and repair.
Key themes
Emotional regulation as prevention
How stress and unmet needs present as behaviour
Family instability and its impact on school functioning
Exclusion, marginalisation and the school to prison pipeline
Punishment versus support, accountability and stability
Teaching conflict skills early before patterns harden
Cross system responsibility rather than silo thinking
International collaboration and youth empowerment
What delegates will gain
A developmental and systemic lens linking childhood stress to adolescent justice outcomes
Clear language for reframing behaviour and resistance
Insight into how punitive systems can accelerate exclusion
A practical model for delivering early conflict education in schools
Understanding of scalable train the trainer approaches
A stronger prevention narrative linking education, family justice and safeguarding
How it connects to other sessions
Bridges the neuroscience foundations into real world systems and educational practice. Strengthens the case for early, relational and non-adversarial intervention and provides a practical counterpoint to court focused discussions by showing what changes when skills are built before families and young people enter crisis systems. Complements later ethical discussions about interpretation, responsibility and safeguarding by reinforcing that prevention begins long before formal decision making.
Day 2 - Katy Harris | Breakout
Hearing the Child Without Harm
Who it will interest
Mediators, family lawyers, CAFCASS professionals, judges, psychologists, social workers, safeguarding practitioners and anyone working with children whose voice, behaviour or expressed wishes are being used to guide decisions in separated or high-conflict family systems
What this session is about
This session explores one of the most urgent and misunderstood challenges in family justice and child inclusive practice, how to hear children’s voices without unintentionally harming them.
Listening becomes dangerous when it is treated as a transfer of responsibility rather than an act of interpretation. When professionals overweight expressed wishes without developmental context, children can end up carrying decisions that adults and systems should hold.
Drawing on child development, trauma informed mediation practice and lived experience of how systems interpret children during separation, this session examines what children’s voices are communicating beneath the surface. The core message is clear, child first does not mean child led.
Key themes
Child voice, not child choice
Alignment, alienation, resistance and refusal as contextual and protective
Neurodiversity and trauma in child expression
Loyalty binds and relational pressure
Interpretation over reporting
Adult responsibility and ethical containment
What delegates will gain
A clear framework for understanding when listening helps and when it harms
Greater confidence interpreting children’s expressed wishes in context
Practical guidance for trauma-informed, neurodiversity-informed child-inclusive practice
Stronger professional language for holding responsibility with adults
A lens that reduces harm and avoids binary narratives
How it connects to other sessions
Strengthens psychological analysis and adult led systemic responses by clarifying when adult responsibility must take priority over child preference.