Olive Stevenson

Olive Stevenson, (13 December 1930 – 30 September 2013) was a British social worker and academic. She became known to the wider public through her role in the inquiry into the Murder of Maria Colwell. As an academic, she researched and taught at the University of Oxford, the University of Keele, and the University of Nottingham among other institutions.

Career Social work From 1954 to 1958, Stevenson worked as a child care officer in Devon.

In 1970, she became the founding editor of the British Journal of Social Work. this was the "first major national enquiry into a child death". It was led by Thomas Gilbert Field-Fisher and they published their findings as Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Care and Supervision Provided in Relation to Maria Colwell in September 1974.

She did not agree with the way the committee had interpreted the evidence and in her minority report pointed out the complexities of the role performed by social workers. She also wrote a section of the main report on inter-professional working, then an unopened area. This all brought her what she described as something like celebrity, which she did not welcome.| Her obituary in The Guardian In her youth she was a Congregationalist but later became agnostic. She was made an honorary professor of Kingston University in 2003 and of Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2004.

The Centre for Social Work and the Centre for Applied Social Research at the University of Nottingham established the Olive Stevenson Memorial Lecture in 2014. The inaugural lecture was delivered by Emeritus Professor June Thoburn and titled 'Using the Heart and the Head in Social Work: Olive Stevenson's Legacy for Today and Tomorrow'.