Board of Directors 2022
The following directors were elected to the Board at the Annual General Meeting on 31 January 2022:
Chair: Cllr Sue Waddington
Sue Waddington, BA Hons, M Ed, is a City Councillor and Chair of the Economic Development Scrutiny Commission. She is a former President of the European Association for Adult Education and a member of the Hall of Fame for International Adult Educators. She has worked in adult education as a community organiser, tutor, lecturer and policy maker.
Secretary: Dr Miriam Gill
Miriam has taught art history and history to mature students over a period of 20 years in a wide variety of institutions including Morley College, London, and for the universities of Birmingham, Nottingham, Oxford and Cambridge.
She has worked for the Vaughan Centre and at the former Vaughan College since 1998. She was the course director for the Certificates in Art History and Architectural History and has been a tutor for the part-time Certificate and BA in Humanities and Arts. She also teaches at the Richard Attenborough Centre.
Treasurer: Blase Lambert
Blase has been a leading player in the UK co-operative and community led housing sector for the last twenty-four years. He is the Chief Executive Officer of the Confederation of Co-operative Housing, is a founder member of Community Led Homes and is the Treasurer of Co-operative Housing International. His areas of expertise are corporate governance, risk management and financial control and he has numerous publications to his name.
Student Representative Director
Sally Birch
Sally Birch studied with the Vaughan Centre of Lifelong Learning, completing both her Certificate of Higher of Education and her BA Hons in Humanities and Arts. Following her degree, she trained to be an English Teacher in a SEMH (Social, Emotional, Mental Health) Secondary school. Sally is now the owner of Karma Corner Gifts.
Sally organised and led a campaign to try to save the Vaughan Centre of Lifelong Learning in Leicester. She is passionate about transforming lives through education.
Other Directors
Monica Hingorani
Monica Hingorani, BA (Hons), MA Ed, is a PhD student at De Montfort University researching creativity in early childhood with families in Leicester. She studied Sociology for her first degree at the University of Leicester in 1987, where she was Women’s Officer. Thirty years on, she returned to the University of Leicester part-time as a primary school teacher-researcher. Monica believes that learning is lifelong and life-wide and has an interest in early learning at home and in the community. She is Chair of Highfields Community Association and a Trustee of Early Education (the British Association for Early Childhood Education). Monica plays bass in a women’s DIY Punk band Dada Women.
Dr Lucy Faire
Lucy is a founder member of Leicester Vaughan College and has been teaching mature students at university level since 2002. She taught at the former Vaughan College and in the Vaughan Centre of Lifelong Learning. She is also an Associate Lecturer for the Open University. Between 2015 and 2020, she was an external examiner for the University of York’s Centre for Lifelong Learning.
You can read more about Lucy here.
Tina Holt
Tina has been teaching at University level since 2011, within Vaughan Centre for Lifelong Learning and the former Vaughan College. Alongside teaching trainee counsellors, she also provides CPD training to professional practitioners and organisations. She gained a BA Hons in Professional Counselling in 2009, underpinned with a HE Diploma (2007) and Certificate (2005) in Counselling. She has been practising as a counsellor for 13 years, working with adults and young people in both private and organisational settings. She also provides clinical supervision and therapeutic consultation to practitioners and staff teams. You can read more about Tina here.
Professor William Myers
A retired Professor of English Literature, William Myers taught numerous adult education courses mainly in literature but also in philosophy in the course of a 45-year career in Higher Education, notably in the very successful and much missed Humanities Degree course established by Robert Colls in Vaughan College, Leicester in the 1990s. At his own request his name was removed from the Leicester University’s list of Professor Emeritae and Emeriti, partly in response to the closure of the Vaughan Centre for Adult Education.
Dr Ulla Rajala
Ulla is an archaeologist and currently an independent researcher. She has taught archaeology and digital skills to adults at the Institute of Continuing Education at Cambridge, Richard Attenborough Centre and WEA East Midlands. At the moment, she is the chairwoman of the Finnish Saturday School in the East Midlands. She was briefly on the tutor panel of the University of Leicester before the Vaughan Centre was closed.
Ulla is the Social Media Coordinator of LVC and takes care of the Facebook and Twitter accounts. If you have a related event you would like her to recognise, tag her in your social media messages.