Sheila began her interest in community work in the early 1980 and in 1998 she was made aware of children being sexually abused through exploitation and began working to develop project to support young people identified.

This work led to the development of Safe & Sound Derby, and her work there was pivotal to the success of Operation Retriever. Following this, there was a surge of requests for support with similar issues across the country and Sheila left her organisation to develop the NWG Network.

This was a network of 256 people in 2011, but today is more than 14000 dissemination points across 300 organisations across the UK, she has been part of the Children’s Commission and the Northern Ireland Inquiries to look at Child Sexual Exploitation. She gave evidence in the Scottish Inquiry, and various other national inquiries and reviews looking at the barriers and challenges of making our children safe in today’s society.

In 2016 the NWG Network were asked to host the National Child Sexual Response Unit as identified in the National Action Plan following her attendance at the No 10 Downing Street Summit in March 2015. Over those three years they received 3,265 requests for support; engaged with 29,797 professionals.