Board of Directors

Deborah is Chief Executive of UCISA, a charitable company which represents the interests of Chief Information Officers in HE and FE and the teams they lead. Reporting to the Chair of the Board of Trustees, she is responsible for upholding the charitable object of UCISA, providing strategic, operational and personnel management for UCISA and its subsidiary companies.

Although a lawyer by profession, Deborah has a wealth of Higher Education experience. Prior to her appointment at UCISA, Deborah was Director of Student Recruitment at the University of Hull, and before that she served on the executive board at Leeds Beckett University, where she led the Marketing and Corporate Communications Directorate.

During her time there, Deborah led a major brand repositioning exercise, in preparation for the university’s name change from Leeds Metropolitan University to Leeds Beckett in September 2014. Deborah also revolutionised the university’s approach to recruitment and the enquirer and applicant experience, developing and launching the university’s first major integrated marketing and recruitment campaigns. These included a range of innovative digital outputs, in addition to their first television campaign.

Through his professional career, Jasbir has developed extensive experience of working with volunteers and voluntary organisations. Within his roles in the Conservative Party, he has developed strong skills in establishing safe and robust safeguarding practices and has been instrumental in ensuring the continuing wellbeing of a wide range of volunteers.

He has been responsible for the constant review and delivery of robust risk management for associations and teams across the whole of the north of England. For more than 15 years, he has worked collaboratively and engaged with government bodies at every level – national, local, legal, administrative and voluntary. This experience has enabled him to share best practice, to develop stakeholder relations, and to deliver successful projects.

In his current role, he is required to ensure that strong governance is in place to improve the institutional performance of the organisation. He is responsible in supporting the understanding, implementation and interpretation of discipline and complaint policies. Through his work in disputes and conflict resolution, and as a trained mediator, he is required to adhere to the Nolan Principles of Public Life.

Michael has eight years’ experience working in the public and charity sectors as a chartered accountant. In his current role (R&I Accountant, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust) he is directly involved in contract review meetings with contract managers, commissioning managers, quality colleagues and providers, experience which has given him insight, for example, into how providers can be held to account through regular contract monitoring of KPIs.

He is regularly called upon to provide contracting, commissioning and financial advice, for example in the development of secondary care Service Level Agreements (SLAs), as well as overseeing financial reporting within parts of the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. This requires him to employ deft oral and written communication skills when working with a variety of internal and external stakeholders.

He is regularly involved in work-based extra-curricular activities, for example in volunteering at Covid clinics, and in being a member of the BAME Network and New Ways of Working group. His professional outlook has been shaped by the values of diversity and difference in the workplace, values which continue to fuel his enthusiasm for delivering high quality outcomes and improved ways of working at both a personal and organisational level.