Katherine Mautner
Organisation(s)
Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families
Overview
Katherine Mautner (BA hons, PGDip SW, MA) is a Social Worker and Play Therapist and Deputy Head of the Family Trauma Service, at the Anna Freud Centre who has been working with children, young people and families with complex needs for nearly 20 years. Her work has a strong focus on attachment and trauma and is informed by mentalization-based approaches.
Katherine started out in frontline social work with child protection and children in care. She subsequently worked in a specialist adoption service, assessing prospective adoptive parents, supporting children in their adoptive families and adopted adults to access information relating to their early lives. For several years, Katherine worked therapeutically with children and young people impacted by parental drug and alcohol use and domestic abuse. She has a private play therapy practice which includes working with children and parents outside in a woodland, as well as in more traditional settings and providing clinical supervision.
As a Senior Clinician in the Family Trauma team at the Anna Freud Centre, Katherine works therapeutically with individual children, parent-child pairs and family groups. She leads the Post-Adoption and Special Guardianship project and oversees and takes part in assessments with families, where children are on the edge of care or have been through the care system. She provides individual and group supervision, including to a London CAMHS team.
Throughout her career, Katherine has worked with children and families who have been bereaved, often in particularly difficult circumstances or when bereavement is experienced alongside other adversities. She is the Clinical Co-lead for the UK Trauma Council’s (UKTC) work on traumatic bereavement and has contributed to other UKTC resources.
Katherine teaches social workers, child mental health professionals and teachers on post graduate university courses including those run by Anna Freud Centre/University College London. She also delivers a number of professional training courses through the Anna Freud Centre.