Rick Hood

Rick Hood is Senior Lecturer in Social Work at Kingston University's Faculty of Health and Education. His research examines welfare inequalities, demand management in children's social care, and the relationship between socioeconomic factors and child protection interventions. He leads studies analyzing national administrative datasets to identify patterns in social care provision.

His current projects investigate school exclusion patterns among children with social work involvement, intervention pathways following assessments, and socioeconomic drivers of demand for child welfare services. He advocates for system reform to address inequalities in child welfare provision and has developed conceptual frameworks for understanding complexity in social work practice.