MARKETING & ADMISSIONS
- IN CONVERSATION WITH -
ALI HENDERSON CEO, ROYAL NATIONAL CHILDREN’S SPRINGBOARD FOUNDATION
Zoe MacDougall talks to Ali Henderson about the role that independent schools can and are playing in helping to bridge the educational divide through harnessing the power of bursary opportunities for those young people who need them most.
How would you describe the Royal National Children’s SpringBoard Foundation’s history and current mission statement? Our mission is to provide young people facing the most challenging of circumstances access to fully funded bursaries at boarding and independent day schools. We target those opportunities for young people who either currently, or have been, looked after in the care system; are vulnerable and on the ‘edge of care due to difficult home lives; or are from areas with high levels of social deprivation.
We were launched originally in 2012 to scale up the model of the Arnold Foundation of Rugby School, which worked with young people from a community organisation in East London, all of whom had been identified as young leaders but ho faced really precarious situations in their home environment, often related to drugs, county lines and knife crime. Through this partnership at community level, young people were provided with the opportunity to attend Rugby School. We took this model of collaborative partnerships to scale – offering schools across the UK the infrastructure to help identify, prepare and support some of the UK’s most marginalised and vulnerable children to gain bursary places and thrive within those schools. Our way of working ensures that we remain in close contact with all ‘SpringBoarders’ beyond their bursary placements, to enable them to secure the fulfilling future careers that we know they desire and deserve. In 2017, we merged with RNCF to become the UK’s largest bursary charity,
Ali HENDERSON Ali Henderson is CEO of Royal National Children’s SpringBoard Foundation (RNCSF). She has over 15 years’ experience of leading programmes and policies to address social inequality, having worked across central and local government in policy and programme management. Ali worked for Oxfam in a strategic policy role prior to joining RNCSF to lead their approach to impact and learning. She was appointed as CEO of RNCSF in March 2020. 20 | schoolmanagementplus.com | Winter 2022
