Meet the Team

Julie Joseph,  Martin Evans, Derek Bannon, David Pithers and Mark Joseph make up the team who drive Common Thread forward. They all have a background in specialist residential childcare, training and consultancy, working with children who have behavioural issues and the staff teams who care for them. They are committed to excellence and the advancement of success through personal development.

Julie Joseph BA (Hons) MSc, RDMP

Registered Movement Psychotherapist

Managing Director

With a career in child care beginning in the late 1980's Julie has enjoyed a varied range of care and business experience and created Common Thread in 2004.

In Common Thread she has invested in a highly talented team all of who have a passion for residential childcare and all of whom (Directors included) are expected to do the job from time to time. Julie constantly ensures that our children are at the heart of everyone's role. Julie has now completed a Masters (Dance Movement Psychotherapy) at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh. Julie's qualification as a psychotherapist gives Common Thread another hugely useful 'string to our bow'. The Common Thread team, in true Julie fashion, are "getting into movement"! - Watch Video

Martin Evans

Finance Director/Chairman

Martin Evan, Chairman and Chief Financial Officer (part time) has more than 30 successful years experience at Board level across a range of industries. For the last seven years he has been providing consultancy services to predominantly the public sector. Having established the Carevisions Group to be the premier private provider of residential childcare in Scotland he consulted to a number of Local Authorities and Central Government on young people in care.  Martin fervently believes that success is only achieved by empowering all to maximise their potential.  This philosophy has been particularly crucial in ensuring the positive outcome for young people in the care of organisations he has been involved in.

Derek Bannon

Head of Care Services

Derek brings a wealth of experience to Common Thread, spanning 35 years of public service. He spent over two years in Housing followed by eighteen months in the Careers Service before accepting a post as a Residential Child Care Officer in an Assessment Centre in Glasgow. Derek spent a further seven years in residential child care in a variety of promoted posts moving to social work headquarters, initially in a community development role. His career in social work saw him occupy a number of middle and senior management posts with a range of authority wide operational and strategic responsibilities which included child protection, residential child care, fostering, adoption, through-care and aftercare, community child-minding, school hostels, and looked after children.

Derek retired from local authority social work in 2007 to pursue his interest in training, and joined a small company that had developed online training based on an attachment and trauma model. Derek was a director with this company until its acquisition in November 2009.

Derek joined Common Thread in March 2010 as the Business Development Manager, where he helped develop not only the outward facing elements of the company, but also increased the Care estate, and got involved in strengthening the theoretical framework and practice base of the houses. Derek’s continues to deliver an improvement agenda while supporting business development.

Jane MacEachen

Operations Manager

I have worked in residential childcare for over 14 years building my skills and qualifications. The early part of my career was spent in local authority where I was promoted to house manager of a six bed house before being asked to set up an extremely successful through-care service in the West of Scotland. Within Common Thread I managed the residential serivces in the central belt.

Throughout my time in the childcare sector I have never lost my passion for the young people I work with. I have never lost the enjoyment of getting to know each individual child, their past experiences, their current difficulties and their understanding of the world. One of the biggest challenges of working with young people is instilling hope for the future. I try to do this by teaching strategies and coping skills and consistently encouraging independence, which I hope the young people will then be able to take with them to build on in their lives.In my new role here at Common Thread I will endeavour to model those beliefs and skills i know provide such successful outcomes for the children we are so blessed to meet and work with.

David Pithers BA & MA, SRN, CRCCYP

Resident Philosopher

Apart from his academic appointments in Cambridge David has forty years experience in residential child-care. For ten years he was National Director of Education, Staff Development and Research with National Children's Home now NCH Action for Children.

His role as Common Threads Residential Philosopher is to encourage the exploration of ideas which, combined with considerable practical experience of the work we do, helps to develop and extend imaginative responses to the needs of the unique children we care for.

He has published many papers and three books on working with children, including with Sarah Greene the best selling children’s book 'We can say no' (Red Fox Books, 1989)

Mark Joseph Bsc (Hons) NLP Master Practitioner

Business Director

Prior to joining Common Thread Mark had gained experiences in a range of areas from  the Royal Australian Navy to the Ski Industry. He has also spent time in the training role and information management. He trained as an NLP Master Practitioner and gives our care teams an initial level of NLP skills. We have found this to be useful to them in personal stress management and self-reflective insight.

Mark is most interested in ensuring operating systems and IT at Common Thread run smoothly. He also takes a lead role in the marketing of Common Thread and coordinates the head-office support team.