About

Once upon a time I found myself at University training to be a teacher. Specifically, a teacher of kids with severe learning disabilities. I’m not quite sure how that happened as the one thing I was sure I didn’t want to do was teach (I’m a school teacher’s daughter), but strange things happen when you’re 18 and making decisions about what to do with your life.

It was the 1980’s and we were big into behavioural approaches that focused on what we felt the young person needed to change and how we could persuade them do it. I was lucky enough to have a tutor who took a different approach and who introduced me to the concept of student-centred learning and to inclusive education.

Fast forward through a couple of years of teaching in a special school where I was the squarest peg in the roundest of holes. Things unravelled quite spectacularly over a 3-month period and I ended up at 23 years old on a locked psychiatric ward, collecting diagnoses. I spent more than ten years in and out of hospital, living on benefits and gradually losing all sense of self- worth.

Person with a laptop smiling at the camera. Tricia Nicoll is in the background smiling at the person.

Most of the time, when people need extra support to live their lives, the solutions that services come up with are a million miles away from what you or I consider even an ordinary life, never mind a fantastic one.

That same tutor gave me the push I needed to find the confidence to get back out into the world and I began volunteering for an advocacy organisation. It was there I started to understand how people with any label or diagnosis have to fight to have a voice and to be seen as more than their impairment. 

A part time paid role came up, which I applied for and got and 3 years later I was the Chief Executive. When the Valuing People White Paper came out in 2001, I was lucky enough to get a job as part of the original Valuing People Support Team, working with some amazing people to try and change the lives of people with learning disabilities.

The original ideas and policy for what we now call personalised care and support planning and personal budgets started in our team and I’m very proud to have been part of that thinking.

All this time I was experiencing strange parallel universes myself; when I was ‘well’, I was valued and respected as a part of a national team working with cutting edge policy that was radically changing the world of social care.

When I was ‘ill’, my only option for support was from a system that seemed to fail to understand what was important to me as a human being – my job, my home, my role, purpose and contribution and my relationships with the people who love me.

Along the way I acquired two kids, as you do. Mine came to me not from me and I’m foster mum to The Boy, who came to me at 10 and is now 28, and The Girl, who came to me at 8 and is now 24.

Both happen to be autistic and have learning disabilities. Given that they were potentially both headed to what the system calls ‘specialist autism services' miles away from where they lived, I feel incredibly proud of what they have achieved and of the beautiful human beings that they are.

I’ve been passionate about the principles of inclusion since I was a student, but I’m now lucky enough to be able to share how I’ve made things work for me and for my kids. I sum this up in the idea of how to get people Gloriously Ordinary Lives and that is what drives every aspect of my work.

  • "Tricia Nicoll is quite a star! She has been instrumental in shaking us up and ultimately helping us to think and behave quite differently. She agitates and challenges but in ways that are focused, warm and real. Ultimately she is about changing lives, changing hearts and minds. We have never felt judged by Tricia who has the ability to help you find ambition at the most difficult of times. Her approach is warm and open and she puts so much effort into working in ways that work for you and the wider organisation. For us Tricia has been instrumental in starting a recruitment revolution across MacIntrye, this revolution is a real milestone not only in terms of finding new ways of attracting employees but in terms of being instrumental in a real cultural shift."

    Sarah Burslem CEO, MacIntyre