Sandra McCormack

Sandra is a registered social worker with twenty years experience as childcare practitioner and manager within a number of local authorities. Her work extended into the development of cross sector integrated Early Years services initially at local authority level before progressing to national  positions  within central government. She played a leading role as a national adviser in early years, working at the interface between central government and local authority partnerships in transferring policy into high quality practice. She has worked to government contracts including the national development of local Early Years provision, Sure Start Local Programmes and the 3500 Childrens Centres where providing local, regional and national workshops and conferences, as well as support and challenge, were inherent within such programme development roles.

She has extensive experience of delivering outcomes focused commissioned services with high levels of accountability, monitoring and reporting. She established and ran an early years service within a consultancy cooperative which focused on evaluating delivery and worked at a local level with service providers and users to develop bespoke improvement plans. She developed the 0-19 Early Help service within a national childrens charity successfully establishing the infrastructure to deliver high quality local provision, training programmes to support practitioners and Quality Assurance processes to secure sustained improvement.  She was Safeguarding lead within the charity and was commissioned to review and revise the national Safeguarding procedures. She established and implemented a process which met the needs of the diverse range of childrens services being delivered by the charity which also aligned to local area safeguarding requirements. She devised the training programme to support practitioners in safeguarding and chaired the charity’s Safeguarding Board.

She has established effective networks at local and national levels with specific focus on inter-agency service development and delivery and the dissemination of good practice. Through the diversity of her work she has engaged in research, analysis, dissemination, and report writer.