Carolyne
Willow

Carolyne has influenced a wide range of national legislation, government guidance and international materials concerned with the rights of children. She ran the Children’s Rights Alliance for England between 2000 and 2012 and founded and led the children’s rights charity Article 39 for a decade before joining The Barrister Group in January 2025. She has worked closely with Council of Europe and United Nations human rights bodies and given written and oral evidence to parliamentary committees and public inquiries including the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. In 2002, Carolyne was a member of the UK Government’s delegation to the UN’s Special Session on Children in New York. 

Carolyne has published extensively, covering topics such as the rights of children in care, ensuring effective advocacy services for children and young people and children’s experiences of living in poverty. She has written and edited seven books, including ‘Children Behind Bars. Why the Abuse of Child Imprisonment Must End’. Benjamin Zephaniah, the late writer and poet who had been incarcerated as a child, wrote in its foreword: “This book tells our truth”. Her latest book chapter focuses on ensuring the child's perspective is at the centre of child protection and is published in The Child Protection Handbook (4th edition, Elsevier, 2024). Carolyne is a regular media commentator on the rights of children.

Carolyne remains a registered social worker (qualified in 1988) and has completed the joint Inns of Court College Advocacy and Family Law Bar Association ‘Advocacy for Vulnerable People and Children (Family)’ course. She is authorised for direct access (where a member of the public can instruct a barrister directly, without having a solicitor) and represents those in receipt of legal aid as well as privately funded.  

Prior to coming to the Bar, Carolyne led national children’s rights charities for nearly 25 years, gaining considerable experience of initiating litigation and working with lawyers.

Across this same period, she built up extensive experience of successfully pressing for law reform to protect vulnerable children, for example: in 2004, she drafted amendments to the Children Act 1989 which require social workers to ascertain and give due consideration to the child’s wishes and feelings when investigating significant harm; in 2010, she pressed for new duties on schools to record the use of force on children, and to notify parents of restraint incidents; and, in 2018, she ensured new legislation around the use of force in mental health units includes special protections for children.

Carolyne served on a government advisory group during the development of the Equality Act 2010 and was a member of the reference group of the equalities review which preceded that legislation. Other roles have included consultant on child custody for the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health’s thematic report on deprivation of liberty and the right to health (2018), Vice-Chair of the Council of Europe's Adhoc Advisory Group on Child and Youth Participation (2009-11) and member of the Advocacy Committee of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (2005-12).

In 2023, Carolyne successfully represented the charity she was running in an information rights tribunal, which resulted in the disclosure of a report examining the deaths and serious harms suffered by children in care: Article 39 v Information Commissioner [2023] UKFTT 733 (GRC). The following year she secured core participant status to module 8 of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry for the same charity, Article 39, which she had founded in 2015. She gave oral and written evidence to this public inquiry in 2025.

Carolyne was named a Children’s Champion in the Kidscape Millenium Dome ceremony in 2000 and won the Social Worker of the Year (Championing Social Work Values) Gold Award in 2017, followed by the Sheila McKechnie Foundation Outstanding Leadership Award in 2020. 

In December 2024, the University of Nottingham awarded Carolyne the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa for her contribution to children and young people’s services. 

• Association of Lawyers for Children
• Bar Human Rights Committee
• Court of Protection Practitioners Association
• Family Law Bar Association
• INQUEST Lawyers Group
• Adult Advisory Panel, Office of the Children's Commissioner for Jersey
• Patron, National Association of Independent Reviewing Officers