Tina is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Social Sciences at the University of Bedfordshire. She is course coordinator for the MA in Childhood, Youth and Family Studies, which also has a JNC youth work pathway. Tina has been teaching youth and community work in a number of educational settings since 2004. She trained as a youth worker at Oasis College from 1992-1994 and went on to be awarded a Masters and Professional Doctorate in Coaching and Mentoring from Oxford Brookes University. She has an interest in mentoring and coaching, as this was an area she specialised in when working as a youth worker and manager in the area of youth inclusion. Part of her doctoral research looked at comparing different mentoring and coaching disciplines and more recent research suggests that greater opportunities to coach young people using strengths-based approaches might be more effective than depending on older, deficit mentoring models.