My wife, Sue Barker, who has died aged 79 of pancreatic cancer, devoted her life to protecting and improving the lives of vulnerable children. Over more than five decades in social work she brought her fierce integrity to some of the toughest cases in England and Wales.
Born in the village of Royston, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire, Sue was the youngest of three children. Her father, Alexander Willett, was a coal miner; her mother, Eleanor (nee Cheetham), had been in domestic service.
After leaving Normanton girls’ high school, Sue became a “house mother” in a boys’ home in Batley, providing love and safety. By the age of 20 she had progressed to running another children’s home, on her own, on call 24 hours a day, with a single day off each week. From this grounding, she went on to take on almost every social work role within children’s and adults’ services, fostering, adoption and safeguarding.
In her 20s she gained her professional social work qualification at Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Beckett University) and worked to make families’ lives better in many of the most deprived parts of Yorkshire. Her 30s were spent in Newcastle and the wider north of England, solving complex welfare cases.
She then went on to run children’s services across South Tyneside. Approaching her 50s she went to Northumbria University, gaining a master’s in management. In her late 50s, she created her own business, MCRT, troubleshooting for social services departments across England and Wales, from Kent to Caerphilly, Tyneside to Yorkshire, often tackling situations where things were deemed to have gone badly wrong.
Beyond local authority work, as regional programme manager for Together for Children for Yorkshire and Humberside, Sue was instrumental in rolling out the government’s Sure Start initiative at its launch in 1998, and contributed to the wider profession through her writing, which included a chapter on Sure Start in the 2009 textbook Making Sense of Every Child Matters.
Sue and I met in 1972 while we were both working for the West Riding social services department. We married in 1977 and built a life together, raising two children, Dan and Jess, in Whitley Bay. Sue created a home full of warmth, generosity and laughter. She loved walking by the sea, reading, interiors, and after 2015, when she made a third and successful attempt to retire, travelling the world.
She was principled and non-judgmental. She gave freely, whether donating her winter fuel allowance to food banks or showing kindness to strangers. She saw her work as a necessity to help families and children have happier futures. She made the world better and my life immeasurably richer.
She is survived by me, our children, and her brother, Alan.
