Amy has been involved in research, evaluation and service development in the field of children and families for over 15 years. She has considerable experience of carrying out research within an organisational context. Her research interests are family separation, family support services, education, SEN, and disadvantage. She specialises in qualitative work with socially disadvantaged groups.

Amy was previously Research Director in the Children and Young People Team at NatCen. Here she managed numerous projects which were qualitative, mixed methods and evaluations. She regularly used deliberative methods, depth interviewing, focus groups, and developed theories of change and logic models. Her work has included several research projects with children and young people.

As Head of Policy and Research at Gingerbread, the national organisation for single parent families, Amy was responsible for carrying out mixed methodology research with single parents, their children, people who work with them and policy makers. This role also involved taking action, and advising campaigns based on her research findings.

Other roles have included teaching for Oxford Brookes on family-focussed service provision, developing tools for the Early Support Programme, teaching life skills and literacy in the Young Women's department of HMP Holloway, training practitioners delivering newborn hearing screening and as a research consultant to the National Children's Bureau (NCB).