Our leadership
Colum Conway
Colum is our chief executive. He is a registered social worker and previously led the Northern Ireland Social Care Council. He spent six years as chief executive of a not-for-profit providing care services across Ireland. Colum has worked in statutory family and child care services, early years policy, funding and service provision, and family systems support services.
Sarah Blackmore
Sarah is the executive director of strategy, policy and engagement and qualified as a social worker from Trinity College Dublin in 1997. Since then, she has worked in a variety of national and international contexts, across statutory, voluntary and regulatory services.
Jonathan Dillon
Jon is the executive director of fitness to practise and is an experienced senior manager with a background in safeguarding and public policy. He has specialised in health and social care regulation since 2007 and has played a key role in the migration of social work regulation from the General Social Care Council to the Health and Care Professions Council.
Philip Hallam
Philip is the executive director of registration, quality assurance and legal. Prior to joining Social Work England, Philip was assistant director of scrutiny and quality at the Professional Standards Authority for health and social care, where he was responsible for leading the authority’s reviews of the nine health and care regulators. Before that, he was head of registration at the General Optical Council.
Greg Ross-Sampson
Greg is our assistant director of corporate services. He spent thirteen years as director of operations at the Health and Care Professions Council, the previous regulator of social workers. His career has involved delivering significant operational improvements, business-wide change programmes and efficiency and financial savings in both the public and private sectors.
Tracy Watterson
Tracy is our assistant director of people and business support. She started her career as a probation officer and has previously worked in central, regional and local government and the voluntary sector. Previously as director of operations for Skills for Justice, she led the merger and development of the organisational people framework, recruitment and training and development strategies.