Trustee - Send Experience - Volunteer

Help build the first independent board of a London CIC that trains the adults around children with SEND. Bring 3+ years of SEND experience, join as a non-executive director, and shape how our founding schools and practitioner register grow safely. What difference will you make? As one of our first independent directors, you help shape how the board works from the start, rather than joining a board that is already set in its ways. Since 2022, our founder's programmes have reached more than 270 participants across five London boroughs. The founding year takes that work into schools at scale and adds a register of practitioners working directly with families. Each step raises the standard of compliance, governance and safeguarding we must meet. Your SEND experience helps in three ways.

• Quality. You make sure what we teach reflects how children with SEND actually experience the school day, and that our practitioners are held to that standard.
• Credibility. Schools, local authorities and funders ask who governs an organisation before they commission it. An independent board with real SEND expertise shows that ANCHOR is run to a standard, not around one person. That opens the door to local authority commissioning, which is how families who cannot pay get access to ANCHOR.
• Safety and sustainability. Every family who books a practitioner trusts us to have vetted, supervised and insured that person properly. Your oversight means those systems are checked by someone who did not design them. Your challenge on evidence and risk helps us answer honestly whether ANCHOR changes what adults do for children with SEND, and whether it can pay its own way. The cause behind all of this is simple. Too many children with SEND are met by adults who care but do not know what to do in the moment. Every school we train and every practitioner we certify means more children meet a calm, consistent adult when it matters most. What are we looking for? Essential At least three years' professional experience working with children or young people with SEND. That experience could come from roles such as
• a SENCO, or a specialist or mainstream teacher;
• a teaching assistant or learning support lead;
• an educational psychologist, speech and language therapist or occupational therapist;
• a local authority SEND officer or caseworker; or
• a leader in a SEND charity or parent carer forum. What matters most is that you understand how children with SEND actually experience the school day, and what helps the adults around them. Would be valuable (one or more of these, not all)
• governance experience, as a school governor, charity trustee or company director;
• safeguarding experience in a school or children's setting, including as a designated safeguarding lead;
• experience of how schools or local authorities commission and buy services. Qualities we are looking for
• Confidence to challenge a founder, and to do it constructively.
• Judging practice by what it changes for the child.
• Sound, calm judgement about risk.
• Being comfortable with a young organisation that is still building its systems, and wanting to help shape them. Lived Experience We particularly welcome applicants with lived experience of SEND, as a parent or carer, or as a disabled or neurodivergent adult. You still need three years' professional experience as well, but your lived experience will shape how we work with families. Support we offer You do not need to have sat on a board before. We give a full induction, including a briefing on a CIC director's legal duties. The appointment is subject to an enhanced DBS check, two references and identity verification at Companies House. Remote What will you be doing? Early Help Support CIC, trading as ANCHOR Inclusion, is entering its most important year. In 2027 we open our training programme to founding schools in three intakes six schools each in January, April and September. At the same time we launch a register of certified practitioners who support families at home. We need a board with the SEND experience to guide that growth. Our board is currently our founder, who leads the organisation and delivers the training. We are now building an independent board and are recruiting two non-executive directors one with SEND experience (this role) and one with finance or governance experience. Together you will form the majority of the board. The board decides by majority. In a community interest company, board members are directors, so you would be appointed as a director at Companies House. You would have legal duties under the Companies Act 2006, and the standard of governance expected is the same as for a charity trustee. Your role on the board
• Lead Director for SEND practice. You review how our training and practitioner standards reflect good SEND practice and the SEND Code of Practice, and challenge the founder where they fall short.
• Quality and evidence. You help the board judge whether the founding year is changing what adults do for children, using what we measure and publish.
• Safeguarding oversight. You make sure our safeguarding arrangements work in schools, online and in family homes. Where the founder is the subject of a concern, it comes to you.
• You will not manage staff or deliver training.
• Why this role matters One-off training rarely changes what adults do in the moment. We designed ANCHOR to change what adults do in the moment in the classroom, in the dinner hall and at home. A director who knows SEND from the inside is how we make sure that stays true as we grow.