“Children in care have some of the poorest outcomes in education. With research indicating that child poverty is projected to increase, growing pressures on the care system are unlikely to decrease. Lighthouse’s’ innovation is therefore critically needed to ensure care workers can provide the support these young people deserve.”
Gina Cicerone and Sam Butters, Co-CEO’s Fair Education Alliance
About Lighthouse and Sinead Kirrane-Davis, lead intrapreneur:
Lighthouse ensures that children in care have the same opportunities as everyone else by creating life changing education-focused children’s homes. They invest in great staff who are able to build authentic relationships in thoughtfully designed physical spaces. Their entire approach is informed by social pedagogy - a relationship-based way of working with children.
Lighthouse has won the Intrapreneurship Award to develop a high-quality training programme for residential care workers across the UK, which will focus on the knowledge and skills that they need to best support children in children's homes. Research has shown that one of the main reasons for instability and low outcomes for children in children’s homes is an under-skilled workforce. Lighthouse’s ambition is to overhaul the training practice and create a wider impact on the sector by making children’s residential care more relationship-based and responsive to the needs of young people.
Sinead Kirrane-Davis is the lead intrapreneur and the Senior Development Manager at Lighthouse, where she looks after recruitment, fundraising and funder management. Sinead joined the Lighthouse team as part of the On Purpose Associate programme, a year-long leadership programme that helps people to change career to do work with positive social & environmental impact. Prior to this, she worked as a management consultant in the People Consulting team, where she supported clients with their workforce challenges, such as attracting and retaining great people, change management and learning.
Sinead says, “I’m fascinated to learn more about the innovation process as part of the Intrapreneurship Incubator and excited to have the opportunity to fully developing this idea with a great network and programme of support around me. I’m especially looking forward to being part of the cohort of Intrapreneurship Awards winners– it’s great to be part of a peer community who will be supporting one another, and to be around like-minded people who are ambitious about making genuine change in addressing education inequality.”