Board of Trustees

As Founder and Chair, Sophie is the guardian of the Pause vision, ensuring that practice remains at heart of organisation.

Sophie’s experience in the worlds of creativity and child protection interact in a dynamic and innovative way to change the lives of the women we support. Over a number of years, Sophie campaigned for a service for women with complex needs who have had children repeatedly removed from their care, a campaign which resulted in the initial Pause pilot.

Sophie is a highly experienced independent advisor on child protection and safeguarding, providing expertise to central government and local authorities across the country. Sophie was appointed by Ministers to look at child sexual exploitation in Oxfordshire and is working as an advisor to Royal Borough of Greenwich in developing a new programme to reduce risk to children through domestic violence (SafeCore). Sophie currently sits on the Ministerial Female Offenders Advisory Board and the Oxfam GB Independent Safeguarding Review Panel.

Simon Tucker is Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees. He was formerly with business strategy consultancy McKinsey & Co and then Chief Operating Officer at frontline social enterprise Kids Company, where he performed a strategic and financial turnaround. His involvement in social venturing prior to the Young Foundation includes a secondment to help set up UnLtd – The Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs (a >£100M fund) and a feasibility study for what would have been the UK’s first social venture fund (which evolved into The Big Issue Invest and Catalyst’s new fund).

Before that Simon practiced as a barrister acting mainly for clients in the education and health sectors, such as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

Simon is a member of the advisory panel for of the Social Investment Bank. He also sits on the boards of social enterprises including Borough Market (perhaps the UK’s oldest extant social enterprise) and Education Television Network (Kenyan ‘edutainment’).

Philippa Hill is a Director in Forensic and Investigation Services at Grant Thornton UK LLP, where she has specialised in accounting disputes and investigations since 2001. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, and was a statutory auditor of small and mid-sized businesses for four years prior to specialising in Forensics.

Philippa has particular experience of advising regulators, companies and their legal advisers on the causes and the impact of accounting misrepresentation, corporate failures, professional negligence and fraud.

Philippa is a Non-Executive Director of Pause and she sits on the Finance and Risk sub-committees to the Board.

Nick Crichton CBE was a solicitor in private practice for 15 years. He was a District Judge for 27 years and the Resident District Judge at the Inner London Family Proceedings Court from its opening in April 1997 until it closed early in 2014. He continues to sit as a Deputy District Judge.

He is a passionate advocate for children’s rights and chaired the Voice of the Child sub-committee of the Family Justice Council. He has been instrumental in setting up the Family Drug and Alcohol Court in the UK– a problem-solving court as an approach to improving outcomes for children involved in care proceedings.

Almudena is currently Head of Policy at the NSPCC. Formerly, she headed the work on social work reform in the Department for Education, leading major programmes like Frontline and Step Up, to attract new talent to the social work profession, improving outcomes for children. Prior to this, Almudena lead the Children’s Social Care Innovation Programme, a £100m programme supporting over 50 projects across the country exploring new ways of helping those in need of support from the children’s social care services.

Prior to joining the Department, Almudena spent four years in the Cabinet Office as part of the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and the Government Innovation Group, advising on issues from welfare reform to social investment and social action.

Before entering the Civil Service, Almudena worked for eight years as an economic consultant at Frontier Economics.

Michael is the Deputy Chief Executive at Ark. He was previously a Junior Partner at McKinsey & Company and led its education practice in the UK. Michael has served as a founding trustee of Achievement for All and Ada, the National College of Digital Skills, and was on the National Advisory Council of Teach First, the Board of the New Schools Network and is currently a Board member of Frontline.

Katherine Gieve is a solicitor with expertise in children and family law; she was chair of the partners and head of the family department at Bindmans LLP until 2014 and is now a senior consultant. She has contributed to the development of family law through the Family Justice Council, where she was the first chair of its safeguarding committee; through her membership of the Nuffield Committee for Family Justice and Child Protection. She is at present a member of the Law Society children law committee.

Her experience of representing children and parents in care proceedings has given her a deep interest in the needs of those mothers whose children are taken into care and whom Pause seeks to support.

Katherine has been a board member at Pause Hackney since 2015 and chair of the Pause Practice Board since 2016.

Before becoming Chief Executive of Lewisham Council, Ian was the Strategic Director of Rotherham Borough Council’s Children and Young People’s Services. He has 33 years’ experience in the public, voluntary and private sectors.

Under Ian’s leadership, Children’s Services in Rotherham was transformed, improving from a rating of inadequate to good with outstanding features, within three years. As lead commissioner for victims and survivors of child sexual exploitation (CSE), Ian has enabled a range of community-based services to support around 1,100 survivors of CSE.

Prior to this role at Rotherham, Ian was Director of Children’s Services and Deputy Chief Executive at Derbyshire County Council, where he led a service which became one of only a few to be rated good across all areas, under Ofsted’s tougher Single Inspection Framework. Inspectors were impressed by the quality of the work delivered by his service and the learning culture which was developed over time, resulting in sustainable improvement and consistently good outcomes for children.

In 2014 Ian was named by  NESTA and The Observer as of one of ‘Britain’s New Radicals’ for his creative ideas in raising aspirations for children in care. He holds a Masters Degree in developing professional practice (incorporating change management) and is a Masters level qualified executive coach and mentor.

Paul Moffat is Chief Executive of Doncaster Children’s Services Trust, the UK’s first independent organisation delivering children’s social care and youth offending services on behalf of the local authority.  He is an Executive Director of the Trust Board and has been a qualified social worker for 28 years.  He is also currently the Children’s Services Advisor for Sandwell, Chairing their Improvement Board.   He has been an active member within SOLACE and part of the ADCS Advisory Groups, including regional and sub-regional action learning sets.

Paul has previously held a number of senior management posts including, Head of Strategy and Performance, Director of Family Services; Corporate Director of Children’s Services, and chaired several Boards including Improvement and Local Safeguarding Boards. He has over 25 years’ experience with a number of councils in the North East and has also worked for the NSPCC, other voluntary organisations, the Health Authority and in student services in a North East university.  Paul was the Director of Children’s Services for Northumberland when they were assessed as “outstanding” for children’s services by Ofsted in 2012.  He has also held senior strategic positions for other authorities who achieved 3 and 4 star ratings under the previous Corporate Performance Assessment (CPA) arrangements.

He served on the regional council for the Prince’s Trust in the North East where he supported young people to develop their key skills, confidence and motivation which enabled them to move into work, education or training.

Paul’s passion for supporting young people to reach their potential has led him to be a member of Sheffield Institute of University Advisory Board, advising on strategy and policy.

Paul’s background is as a professional social worker and he is also a qualified occupational therapist.  He is married with three grown up children and his hobbies include trekking in Nepal and supporting a range of voluntary organisations.