Meet the team

Dr Lisa Gentle BSc (Hons), PgCert, PhD - Research Manager/Fellow

Lisa’s role at Norland includes developing the current research community and supporting colleagues with designing, planning and conducting research alongside carrying out her own. Lisa is currently involved in projects examining to what extent unconscious biases about early attachment relationships contribute to engagement in later mentoring relationships, the impact of Emotion Coaching, staff perception of Attachment Aware Schools programmes, and understanding caregiver perception of infant sleep and activity levels.

Before joining Norland, Lisa spent some time as a nursery nurse and nursery lead.  Later, she worked in further education as a course leader for Early Years Care NVQ programmes, and then as college lead for the assessment and internal quality assurance of vocational, City and Guilds and BTEC qualifications. After completing a degree in psychology and qualifications in counselling and mentoring, Lisa worked as a mental health worker, a student counsellor, and as an author for courses delivered nationally to people in prison and on probation. Until taking up her current post, she was Research Associate and Assistant Managing Editor of the Norland Educare Research Journal.

Lisa’s STEM attachment base psychology PhD involved her using methods from the fields of corpus linguistics and sentiment analysis to carry out quantitative analysis of data gathered using the Attachment Script Assessment (ASA), Mentoring Script Assessment (MSA), and a questionnaire. This enabled her to examine statistically significant relationships between peoples’ unconscious assumptions about attachment relationships and mentoring relationships, and their actual engagement in mentoring. Novel insights were gained about ASA and MSA population validity, the relationship between implicit secure base and mentoring assumptions, and about ASA and MSA transcript features. The findings resulted in recommendations for streamlining the MSA and for how to adapt the ASA and MSA for use in applied scenarios such as education, mental health, and business settings. Lisa aims to use the outcomes to inform further research and applied mentoring projects.

Lisa’s varied professional experiences have shown her the positive impact well trained early years professionals have on the children, families and communities they work with. She is passionate about conducting high quality research aimed at informing excellent practice that brings tangible benefits to people, and enjoys supporting others with their own research journey.

Dr Lisa Gentle is an Affiliate Member of the University of Exeter Creativity and Emergent Educational-Futures Network (CEEN).