Administrators
Mikki Francis-Lawton
Main Administrator
Suzanne James
Administrative Assistant
Join ADSHE and make a difference – BY the members, FOR the members.
Mark Worrall
Mark has been working in the Higher Education sector since 2008. His experience includes working as a Lecturer, Specialist Study Skills Tutor and Specialist Teacher Assessor at Cardiff Metropolitan University and the University of Gloucestershire. At the latter institution he set up and Chaired the Continuing Professional Development group for Specialist 1:1 Tutors, meeting once a term to share best practice, participate in CPD and Professional Peer Supervision (PPS)®.
Mark has been on the ADSHE Exec since 2016, and became Regional Officer in 2017. As Regional Officer, he was responsible for rolling out ADSHE Accredited CPD at Regional Group meetings, as well as encouraging space for members to undertake PPS®, to network, and to support each other. He has been Chair of ADSHE since September 2018. In this role his aim is to ensure the core principles of ADSHE are reflected in the work of its members, in supporting neurodivergent students within all HEP’s.
Judy Turner, Treasurer
Judy has been a member of ADSHE for more than 16 years. During that time she served as a member of the executive in the roles of Regional Coordinator, SASC Representative and Training Officer and as QA Officer. She is at present ADSHE’s Treasurer.
Judy worked as a research fellow for 11 years at York, Durham and Reading Universities and has been involved in research into memory in adults and children, baby vision and aphasia. She worked as a study advisor, teacher of learning development and SpLD assessor for 13 years at the University of Reading before becoming a freelance Educational Psychologist and assessor of adults. She is passionate about enabling students with SpLDs to reach their full potential at university.
Jackie Hatfield, Regional Officer
Jackie has been supporting neurodivergent students, in a 1:1 setting, at Loughborough University for 14 years. In this role, she engages with students ranging from those beginning their learning journey in Higher Education through to those pursuing the challenges of researching and writing their PhDs.
Jackie supports neurodivergent students from across the range of disciplines at Loughborough. This experience has made her aware of the frustrations they encounter with academic writing. As a predominately visual learner she has become increasingly interested in investigating visual and creative strategies. This journey has led Jackie to discover Lego Serious Play, and prompted her to become a trained facilitator of Lego Serious Play methodology, to support her neurodivergent students (and potentially the wider student population) to reach their potential in a text heavy environment. In 2015, Jackie became one of the Regional Coordinators for the Midlands Regional Group, along with her Loughborough colleague, Tina Horsman. In September 2019, she became the Regional Officer of ADSHE.
Helen Ball, Assistive Technology Officer
Helen has worked as an Assistive Technology Trainer and the Study Skills Tutor since 2011. She also heads up the Quality Assurance program and creates e-learning content for her company’s training program. She was voted on to the Exec in 2018 and has now experienced organising her first conference in 2019, which was great fun! She has been developing and maintaining the online platform which runs the ADSHE Level 5 course in SPLD practice. She enjoys her diversity of roles and feels that having her fingers in many pies is empowering, as it reflects how the sector works from all sides e.g. profit and non-profit.
Helen always suspected that she had dyslexia, so receiving a positive diagnosis later in life affirmed and furthered her achievements in academia. Her own experience of the DSA system helps her to make her students’ needs and strengths paramount. She is passionate about Assistive Technology, and upholds that access to information is a human right. She also believes that the integration of Study Skills and Assistive Technology helps enable students to explore strategies for learning in a metacognitive way. More simply put, AT and study strategies empower the skill of learning how to learn. This focus is fundamental to successful outcomes and, most especially, improves individuals self-efficacy. As a dyslexic herself, she knows the importance of confidence in the learning process and that poor confidence can be marginalising.
Diane de Villiers, Freelance Officer
Diana joined ADSHE when she started working in HE in 2008. As she has worked as a freelancer for a number of years, Diana feels passionately about endorsing the role of the freelancer and took up the ADSHE role of Freelance Officer in 2018. The role of the freelancer in this sector has become more demanding, providing opportunities as well as challenges. Diana came from teaching into SpLD support. She is a Specialist Teacher Assessor and Director of a company providing NMH support to students. In addition, Diana works as a Dyslexia Advisor at the University for the Creative Arts.
Jane Warren, SASC Representative (Co-opted)
Jane has been an ADSHE member since 2005, when she became a dyslexia tutor assessor at the University of Southampton. She has strong experience in teaching, screening and assessing students with dyslexia and is about to renew my APC for the fifth time! Between 2011 and 2018 she held a Senior Teaching Fellowship, leading Southampton’s MSc Ed SpLD, accredited for both AMBDA and AMBDA FE/HE, and training a new generation of specialists. She combined this with a part-time post at Reading University doing diagnostic assessments. In 2018, she relocated to the Midlands and became a freelance specialist, mainly as a diagnostic assessor. Since 2016, she has represented ADSHE on the Board of SASC. Jane supports ADSHE’s vital contribution towards maintaining and enhancing the professional standing of dyslexia specialists, especially through the Quality Assurance process and new Level 5 course, for which she is an Internal Moderator.
Karisa Krcmar, QA Officer
Karisa Krcmar has an MBA from Glasgow, an MEd and PhD from Birmingham. After working in a variety of commercial sectors ranging from shipping to ballet, she changed direction, went into teaching adults and became fascinated with why learners don’t learn. She undertook dyslexia teaching and assessor training, followed by CPD focussing on ADHD and Mental Health and became a Specialist Tutor at Loughborough University.
Karisa is a Mindfulness practitioner, and with one of her colleagues, developed and ran mindfulness workshops culminating in the publishing of Mindfulness for Study: from procrastination to action. She was the first editor of the Journal of Neurodiversity in Higher Education (ADSHE) and has edited books about inclusive learning and teaching (The Inclusivity Gap) and successful projects for building students’ mental health resilience (Helping Penguins to Swim). Karisa is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has a black belt in Shotokan Karate.
Elaine Doffman, Training and Development Officer
Elaine has been part of ADSHE for 10 years, firstly as a member and then jointly running the North Wales and North West group. She has, for many years, quietly worked in the background to produce resources and share expertise with others. More recently she has begun to share her ideas with other groups throughout the country. Her background was originally teaching, and she gained her first qualification in dyslexia over 30 years ago. She began working as a Study Skills Tutor for agencies 16 years ago, and four years ago joined an in-house team. Elaine loves producing resources and teaching others, and had some of her ideas published when teaching. Her new role within the ADSHE Executive is extremely exciting as it also involves producing resources for others.
Ros Lehany
Ros has been a member of ADSHE since 2004 and was on the Executive committee from 2006-2014. She was the Chair of ADSHE between 2008- 2012. Between 2016 and 2019 she supported ADSHE in a consulting and mentoring role before becoming a director in 2019. Ros trained with Dyslexia Action in 2000, worked for them for five years and later tutored on their Postgraduate Distance Learning course. From 2004-2016 Ros worked at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance (HEI) in Leeds where she was responsible for screening, assessing and supporting students with a range of Specific Learning Difficulties. She is a partner in Dyslexia Solutions LLP and is an assessor. Ros has extensive experience of developing and delivering specialist training in a wide range of business and educational settings, and has also developed accredited training.
Tanya Zybutz
Tanya Zybutz qualified as a dyslexia tutor on the first course of its kind set up by Ellen Morgan in 1993. She set up the Dyslexia Support Service at Queen Mary, University of London and worked as Senior Dyslexia Tutor at London Metropolitan University before moving to the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama. Tanya helped establish the in-house Service at Central and is currently the Dyslexia Co-ordinator overseeing a team of 8 specialist 1:1 tutors. Her involvement with ADSHE started at its inception in 2001 where she held the post of Deputy Treasurer.
She has been Deputy Chair and has also held the joint Exec post of Quality Assurance with Janet Skinner. Currently, she is an Officer without Portfolio meaning she does a bit of everything. Tanya’s commitment to the profession is evident in her being a part of both working parties of the ADSHE 7-Principles® and Guidelines for Quality Assured Professional Practice (Revised 2017). Also, she initiated the Quality Assurance protocols of the organisation with Janet Skinner, pioneering Professional Peer Supervision® as reflective practice for on-going professional development.
Tanya runs training workshops across the country for Regional Groups, as well as offering live PPS® case study workshops in all ADSHE’s Conferences and Professional Development Days. Her specialist interests include screening neurodivergent learners and more recently the neurodivergent training actor. Untangling maladaptive coping mechanisms, often based on trying to embody neurotypical solutions, is the bedrock of her practice; while actively promoting authentic inclusive learning and teaching is her passion.