Meet Our New Trustee, Laura Hadley

Throughout her career, Laura’s roles have primarily revolved around the care, protection and improvement of Children and families lives.  Having been a front-line Children and Families Child Protection Social Worker for 8 years, she then commenced exploring different roles, opportunities, and responsibilities around the protection of vulnerable groups.  Having been a Child Protection Chair and working closely with police, health and education her interest then grew around compliance, procedures, QA, and strategic leadership of organisations running social work services.  An area that Laura feel very strongly about is addressing the drift in local authorities for children waiting to be assessed for permanence whether at home or away from home. To this end alongside the centre of Excellence for looked after children in Scotland, she created and managed a team of professionals within an LA in Scotland to address this issue, measuring the outcomes for children up to the age of 2 who were part of the pathways created.

From here, Laura then became the registered manager for one of the largest fostering and adoption charities in the UK, managing fostering services for the West of Scotland.  This introduced her to the responsibilities of budgets, contracts, tenders, and large-scale senior management responsibility with real influence at a governmental level.

After 2 years she was then offered the role of Service Manager for the NSPCC, managing the services in Scotland.  Once again this held similar responsibilities alongside strategic leadership, practice, and quality improvement and also the opportunity to manage an incredibly skilled and professional team who were part of a randomised control trial, once again measuring outcomes for young children removed from their family home.  Whilst in this role she was also invited to sit on the serious and organised crime task force and has continued to be a CEOP ambassador and trainer.  Within her role with the NSPCC, she worked closely with media, fundraising and Policy colleagues throughout the UK.  She was also invited to sit on steering groups for children and young people with sexually harmful behaviours, Child Protection forums, third sector city forums and many more.

Find out more about our trustees and staff