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CHAMPIONS Churchill Fellowship Partnership

Churchill Fellowship 2024-2025: CHAMPIONS PI Professor Lakhanpaul’s Journey

The CHAMPIONS team is proud to share that our Principal Investigator Lead, Professor Monica Lakhanpaul, was selected for a Churchill Fellowship in 2024.

The Churchill Fellowship is a prestigious national programme funded by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust that supports leaders from the across the UK to travel overseas, discover innovative ideas and best practice, and bring back knowledge to create positive change in their communities and across society in the UK. It was founded by public donation in 1965 as the living legacy of Sir Winston Churchill for the nation.

She travelled to Australia to explore how different systems respond to the needs of children living in temporary accommodation in the spring of 2025. Her Fellowship focused on building UK–Australia knowledge exchange and identifying policies, practices and community-led projects that could support our CHAMPIONS initiatives and inform more effective, compassionate public sector responses to child temporary accommodation and homelessness interventions and support in both countries.

Walking alongside vulnerable communities

One phrase that Professor Lakhanpaul heard repeatedly during her Fellowship was: “You need to walk alongside them.”

This principle, of engaging with vulnerable and underserved communities as equal partners rather than mere subjects of health, education and social interventions policy, guided her Fellowship.

Across the world in Australia, another overall economically developed context like the UK, homelessness and unstable housing continue to take a serious toll on children’s health and wellbeing. Children growing up in temporary accommodation face disrupted education, limited access to healthcare, food insecurity and significant physical and psychological trauma. Despite this, their voices are too often absent in policy and practice.

Meetings at Relationships Australia SA office, Australia's leading non-profit offering free and low-cost relationship counselling, family dispute resolution and domestic violence support services.

Fellowship Journey

Adelaide, March 2025

Hosted by Dr Yvonne Parry, who also serves as our CHAMPIONS International Advisor, and her team at Flinders University’s Caring Futures Institute, Professor Lakhanpaul engaged in fieldwork engagement and knowledge-sharing with organisations including St John’s Youth Services, Relationships Australia SA, Toward Home Alliance, Uniting Communities, The Foundry at SYC, Baptist Care SA, Aboriginal Family Support Services, Wardli-ana, Aboriginal Sobriety Group, Centacare, Together4Kids, ANWHA and Junction Australia.

She met frontline leaders such as Lakshmi Sri (Relationships Australia SA), Shaya Nettle (Toward Home Alliance), and Lucy Rogers (The Foundry at SYC), with whom she is now co-developing an Australian and British exhibition for the Adelaide Fringe Festival 2026.

Policy discussions included a roundtable with Minister Nat Cook MP, the South Australian Housing Trust and the Department of Human Services, exploring data, housing standards and the need for a global network. She also engaged with Verity Paterson (Chief Child Protection Officer, DHS), Wakwakurna Kanyini (led by Ashum Owen), April Lawrie (Commissioner for Aboriginal Children and Young People), and Sarah Morris (DHS), who shared insights from Nirrumbuk Environmental Health and Services’ national system change work.

Professor Lakhanpaul meeting Dr Yvonne Parry, who also serves as our CHAMPIONS International Advisor, and her team at the Caring Futures Institute, Flinders University, who have been evaluating parenting programs for years and working on award-winning projects funded by the Australian government, addressing intersections between nursing, primary health, public health and community health services for vulnerable children.

Brisbane, March to April 2025

In Brisbane, Professor Lakhanpaul joined Queensland Children’s Hospital for a hospital-wide health equity programme and met researchers at the Centre for Children’s Health Research. She engaged with Health and Wellbeing Queensland on food security, Micah Projects on housing support, Mater Refugee Health, the Institute for Urban Indigenous Health, and the Pasifikai programme for Pacific Islander families.

At a community centre event, she participated in the co-design of an intervention to improve nutrition and health for families from the Torres Strait Islands, while also delivering talks and forging research collaborations.

La Perouse community centre, Eastern Suburbs of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, knowledge exchange findings which have fed into our PSREFUGEE linked project at UCL.

Sydney, April 2025

In Sydney, engagements included the La Perouse Community Centre, where learnings have already been integrated our UCL’s PSPREFUGEE Project. At Sydney Children’s Hospital (Randwick), Professor Lakhanpaul met Michelle Jersky, Program Manager for Arts in Health and Community Development at Community Child Health, to explore future arts-based intervention collaborations.

At the University of New South Wales, she worked with Professor Adam Jaffé (John Beveridge Professor of Paediatrics) and was introduced to Dr Paula Bray (Director of Research, Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network) to plan joint collaborations. She also met Dr Nusrat Homaira (UNSW and Sydney Children’s Hospital) to discuss future work on childhood asthma across the UK, Australia and South Asia. Partners also shared the RArEST National Recommendations for Rare Disease Health Care, the result of an Australian government project from 2021 to 2024 which aimed to co-design practical resources to support people living with a rare disease (PLWRD), healthcare professionals, advocates and decision-makers across the country, this allowing for knowledge sharing that will feed back into her role as National Patient and Public Involvement co-lead at UCL’s Biomedical Research Centre back in the UK.

Finally, meetings with New South Wales Health brought together senior policy officers and advisers to discuss embedding health equity in practice.

Outcomes

The Fellowship confirmed that temporary accommodation is deeply harmful to children’s health, wellbeing and development in the Australian context too, in many ways similar to the UK context.

Key learnings included:

Health and nutrition: Unsafe, cramped environments limit safe cooking, food storage and nutrition. Infants face high injury risks.
Development and mental health: Overcrowding and frequent moves disrupt sleep, attachments and routines. Parents experience high stress, affecting children.
Education: Distance, poor transport and unstable internet undermine attendance and learning. Frequent school changes disrupt continuity.
Safety and safeguarding: Mixed placements increase risks. Secure play and sleep spaces and consistent safeguarding checks are lacking.
Disproportionate impact: Underserved Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families are disproportionately affected, underscoring the need for culturally-tailored, self-determined solutions.

Policy impact meeting with Australian Minister for Human Services Nat Cook MP Kylie Scholz, DHS, Dr Lauren Moulds, DHS and Alex Reid, DHS.

Long-Term Impact

Professor Lakhanpaul’s Fellowship has already generated outcomes in research, policy and international collaboration.

Policy influence: In March 2025, Professor Lakhanpaul co-launched the In Their Own Words report (with De Montfort University, UCL and Shelter Scotland) at the Scottish Parliament. The report, amplifying children’s lived experiences of homelessness, attracted national media coverage and is shaping more humane housing policy worldwide.
Public engagement: Alongside her academic and policy work, Professor Lakhanpaul is a regular contributor to BBC World Service Health Check and has, since her return, been featured in The Guardian, bringing global health issues to broad audiences.
International collaboration: Post-Fellowship, she hosted Peter Allred (Deputy CEO, Relationships Australia SA) in the UK and connected with Associate Professor Sue Woolfenden (UNSW), furthering joint international research and policy dialogue.

Next Steps

The Fellowship has directly informed CHAMPIONS’ work on the NIHR PSPREFUGEE project, addressing the health needs of refugee and asylum-seeking children under 5 in the UK.

A policy briefing with Minister Nat Cook MP is planned, alongside the development of an international UK–Australia network to support refugee child health and housing needs.

Her next post-Fellowship priority is to build long-term UK–Australia collaborations for evidence-based, child-centred policy, directly informed by lived experience in both countries.

Her key recommendations resulting from the Fellowship include:

A National Children-in-TA Standard: minimum facilities, no mixed placements, staff vetting, continuity of school and health support, limits on length of stay.
Rapid Rehousing for Families: prioritising pregnant women and infants, landlord incentives, homes near schools and hospitals.
A Health-Education-Safety Response for every family entering TA: health checks, nutrition support, school and transport assistance, income and legal help.
Community-led design: involving underserved and minority communities in co-designing standards and embedding culturally responsive practice.
Data, transparency and accountability: national datasets, quarterly dashboards, audits and provider accreditation.

Final Reflection

The Churchill Fellowship provided a rare and valuable opportunity to explore a global challenge internationally. Professor Lakhanpaul’s work reinforces our CHAMPIONS vision that the voices of children and families must be central to designing solutions. Momentum is growing, and through sustained collaboration, research and advocacy, this Fellowship is helping our CHAMPIONS team build pathways toward systemic and sustainable change in collaboration with old and new Australian partners.

Read her Fellowship report here https://wakelet.com/wake/NqojFkGOlVs9Ubjp4RHXm