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Lady Diana Whitmore
CEO of Teens and Toddlers
Diana is the Chief Executive and a founding Director of Teens and Toddlers UK, a charity founded in 2001 to address the social exclusion of young people and, in doing so, reduce the number of young people not in employment, education or training (NEET), as well as reducing teen pregnancies.
Teens and Toddlers runs a range of early intervention programmes focused on inspiring young people to achieve the skills, qualifications and self-belief they need to succeed in school, work and life. The original vision for the programmes was conceived in the US in the late 1970s by Diana’s friend and mentor Laura Huxley, widow of Aldous Huxley.
The charity’s flagship programme, also called Teens and Toddlers, pairs disadvantaged teenagers with vulnerable three to five year olds in a nursery environment, where both teens and “toddlers” benefit from the interaction; the teens acting as mentors to the toddlers and the toddlers, in turn, providing the teens with a sense of responsibility. Outside of the nursery group coaching sessions help the teens to explore such topics as behaviour management, sexual health and risky behaviour. Upon graduation they earn a nationally accredited award in interpersonal skills.
As well as being CEO of Teens and Toddlers Diana is founder, President and Co-chair of the Psychosynthesis & Education Trust, having practised psychosynthesis – a branch of positive psychology concerned with helping individuals to realise their potential - for 35 years. She is an accredited member of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapists and a British Association of Counselling and therapy Accredited Supervisor. She is also the author of two books, Psychosynthesis Counselling in Action and Psychosynthesis in Education: A Guide to the Joy of Learning.
Diana advised the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insight Team for a paper on interventions in 2009 and presented at the ‘Behavioural Change in Public Health’ conference in February 2012. She is a member of the trustee board of the Findhorn Foundation.