A new leader for Pace

A new leader for Pace

After four and a half years as our Chief Executive, Ian Sansbury has moved on to a new set of challenges at mental health charity Mind Over Mountains. Over his time at Pace, Ian has taken the charity forward purposefully, while maintaining a clear focus on what has always made our specialist work so distinctive and impactful. Ian’s leadership has taken us further towards Pace’s vision, that every child with a neurodisability, and their family, can access the sort of specialist provision that Pace delivers.

We are grateful to Ian for his strategic and commercial skillset, as Pace has increasingly been able to harness the potential of early intervention, assistive technology and the opportunity to reach many more children and families through the power of digital. Through Ian’s financial and fundraising skills, and his deep passion for our work, Pace is financially secure, with a strong platform for the future.

Ian left Pace on February 9th, 2023.

Impact paragraph portraits

The following ‘Paragraph Portraits’ take a closer look at the challenges faced by three of our school children and how the combined efforts of the Pace team have helped them overcome or manage those challenges. The stories are truly inspiring! Click on each picture to read more.

Pace – a trauma informed organisation

Our commitment to building our specialism and expertise within Pace will see the entire Staff team completing training this year on becoming a trauma informed organisation. Whilst we already have a baseline knowledge and expertise in this field, particularly through our occupational therapy team, the additional knowledge, awareness and skills that are gained from this training will be filtered throughout our policies and practice going forward to help to further improve our practice and the way we serve our Pace community. 

Trauma is often described as an emotional shock with a lasting effect. It can be experienced by the children we support, but also by their parents and the wider family due to the emotional impact of parenting a disabled child. Trauma-informed practice aims to increase practitioners’ awareness of how trauma can negatively impact on individuals and communities, and their ability to feel safe or develop trusting relationships with health and care services and their staff. It aims to improve the accessibility and quality of services by creating culturally sensitive, safe services that people trust and want to use. It seeks to prepare practitioners to work in collaboration and partnership with people and empower them to make choices about their health and wellbeing. 

Pace Advice and Support Hub

Pace Advice and Support Hub

We launched the new Pace website (www.thepacecentre.org) in June 2022, alongside our new brand. The new site incorporates our Advice and Support hub, which now contains 33 individual pieces of digital advice and support content.

We have also made significant progress in building our new training platform, using LearnDash – the industry leading plug-in for online training. This will enable us to fully integrate online learning into our staff training and development programme and our service provision, allowing us to reach more children and their families nationally, even internationally. It will also help us disseminate our practice through offering training to external practitioners and professionals.

Pace Child & Family Therapy Services – early intervention impact

Pace Child & Family Therapy Services – early intervention impact

We repeated the Pace family therapy survey in the summer of 2022 and now have three years’ worth of comparable data to publish.

Parents continue to rate our early intervention service highly, with 82% rating it as “excellent” and 18% as “good”. See the full results here:

Results

New Finance and Operations Director

In December last year we welcomed Jas Nijar to the Pace team as our new Finance & Operations Director. Jas is a very experienced Finance professional, having held senior finance roles at Pearson (the publisher of the Financial Times), a Westminster-based group of GP surgeries and most recently with Target Ovarian Cancer. 

Jas took over the role from Ann Tomkins, who retired at the end of December last year after seven and half years of dedicated service. Ann and Jas worked together during December to ensure a smooth transition. 

New Deputy Head

Richard Smith joined Pace in January 2023. Richard has been involved within SEN education for over fifteen years. He has over 10 years of senior management experience and was Assistant Headteacher in his previous school.