Monday 26 January 1pm – 2pm
For the Public
Watch the recording here
A Q&A with ‘This Morning’ Agony Aunt Deidre Sanders about family separation and mediation, chaired by FMC Accredited (FMCA) Mediator Philippa Johnson.
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Deidre Sanders is resident agony aunt on ITV’s This Morning programme and edited the daily Dear Deidre problem-page in The Sun from 1980 – 2020. Deidre trained in counselling and, with the help of her team, answered every reader’s problem personally – more than six million over the years via post, online and telephone helplines. She was awarded an MBE in 2023 for services to charity and the nation’s mental health. She is president of the Family Lives charity, ambassador for Adfam and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She helped found the Kids in the Middle coalition of 30 charities and 25 agony aunts campaigning for children affected by their parents’ poor relationship or relationship breakdown. |
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Like many mediators I have had a mixed bag of jobs and my path to becoming a mediator has been a winding one. I trained as a family mediator in 2012, having previously worked as a legal publisher with Sweet & Maxwell, as a freelance publishing consultant specializing in databases, as a law reporter for Jordans’ Family Law Reports, and as the administrator of the International Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (now the IA of Family Lawyers). I still work in legal updating alongside my mediation work, now as the law reporter on Bloomsbury Publishing’s Family Court Reports. I have found the mediation community a warm and supportive one and in an attempt to help it stay that way I am a current Board member of the Family Mediators Association and a past Chair of FMA, I am part of the team delivering FMA Foundation Training to people wishing to become family mediators and I also deliver training courses to experienced mediators on behalf of FMA. I was very honoured to be one of the two editorial consultants who worked on the family mediation ‘bible’ Lisa Parkinson’s Family Mediation (4th edition) |
