Lucy Morrison-Childs
Family Mediator | Psychology & Mental Health Specialist
Lucy Morrison-Childs is a Family Mediator with a specialist background in Psychology, Child Development and Emotional Wellbeing. She holds a Master’s degree in Child Mental Health, alongside undergraduate training in Psychology and Counselling, and brings depth, warmth, and clinical insight to her mediation practice.
Lucy works at the intersection of family conflict, mental health, and early intervention. Her approach is firmly child-centred and grounded in emotional intelligence, with a strong focus on safeguarding, regulation, and inclusive practice. She is trauma-informed and neurodiversity-informed, ensuring mediation spaces are accessible, responsive, and safe for children, parents, and professionals alike.
Lucy co-delivered the Resolve Enrichment Programme with Katy Harris at Rushcliffe, working directly with young people to build emotional literacy, conflict skills, and reflective capacity before crisis points are reached. The programme was embedded within a real school setting and observed throughout by senior leadership, providing rare, lived evidence of how early intervention can shift behaviour, wellbeing, and relational dynamics.
Her work is shaped by a deep commitment to listening, prevention, and systemic change, helping families, schools, and professionals respond earlier, more compassionately, and more effectively to conflict.
Day 1 - Professor Gigi Gutiérrez, Lucy Morrison-Childs & Katy Harris | Breakout
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.