Samantha Leonard

ARC England Director

Samantha joined ARC England in June 2025. She has worked in social care for her entire career and her experience spans senior operational and strategic management in a range of services, including supported housing, day services and local authority commissioning.

She has worked at 4 different Local Authorities in the Northwest and South Yorkshire. The golden thread throughout her career is an interest and passion for advocacy, equality and inclusion. She believes people with lived experienced should be involved in all decisions which affect them through good co production.

Samantha lives in Lancashire but originates from Manchester. She lives with her husband and son.

Liz Collins

Relationship and Communications Manager

Liz joined ARC in 2020 from a background in digital marketing and journalism in the public and private sectors. She looks after our membership recruitment and renewals, and handles ARC England's communications via our website and social media.

Rod Landman

Training and Project Lead

Rod has spent his entire working life in services for people with learning disabilities and autistic people. He delivers training on a wide variety of topics and is the lead Project Officer for our externally funded projects.

Rod heads ARC England’s training on the Mental Capacity Act, Medication, Risk Management, Online Harms, Self-Harm and Self-Neglect, Mate Crime, Domestic Abuse, and others.

Rod’s most recent project was Us Too, a Comic Relief-funded user-led project on domestic abuse and sexual violence for women with learning disabilities and autistic women. The Us Too team has drawn on their experiences to design and deliver peer education workshops, staff training and accessibility work with domestic abuse services.

Rod was previously Project Officer for (amongst many others):

– Safety Net – a project on mate crime
– Get SMART (Social Media Awareness and Resilience Training) project – a user-led project on social media grooming for extremism and radicalisation.
– Helping Each Other, another user-led project on sexual exploitation.

Rod has also worked on research projects with Durham, Sunderland and Manchester Metropolitan Universities, and has just published a SWOTT Toolkit on domestic abuse with Sheffield University.

Angela DeLiddiard

Qualifications Centre Manager

Angela joined ARC as the Qualifications Centre Manager in November 2016 but has also work for ARC as a Development Officer (ARC Assessor and IQA) for 15 years. She has a wealth of knowledge and experience in Health and Social Care and the Learning Disability Sector, having worked and trained in the field of Learning Disabilities for the best part of 30 years since leaving secondary education.

Angela is keen to support all the organisations that access the Centre and to listen to their unique requirements in order to enable them to achieve a qualified workforce that promotes quality services.

As someone who started their own learning journey and development through a YTS (Youth Training Scheme) all those years ago, Angela is passionate about staff development and training within the workplace, which promotes the delivery of a high quality, person focussed approach for the individuals we ultimately support.

Vicky Shirley

Operations Co-ordinator (England) and Governance Co-ordinator (UK)

After joining ARC in 2003 as a part time Disclosure Service Administrator, Vicky became the England Operations Coordinator in 2013. She is responsible for the general running of the England office, offering support to her colleagues where needed to help with the smooth running of the services we offer.

Vicky is also the Governance Coordinator, supporting the Chair of the Board of ARC, arranging meetings and the AGM. She also supports the Strategic Leadership Team, coordinating the meetings between the ARC England, ARC Northern Ireland and ARC Scotland Directors and the ARC Finance Director.

Denise Adams

Disclosure Service Administrator & Training Administrator

Denise originally joined the ARC England team in June, 2018, to administer the Workforce Development Fund and in 2019 took over as Administrator for the ARC Disclosure Service. This includes carrying out checks on behalf of organisations in England and Wales through the Disclosure and Barring Service, Scotland through Disclosure Scotland and Northern Ireland through AccessNI. Denise also carries out all the administrative duties for ARC England training workshops.  Denise can be contacted on the dedicated Disclosure Service number 01246 541660.

 

 

 

Claire Stanton

Business Development Officer

Claire joined ARC in 2021 from a background in operations management and business planning. She initially looked after the Workforce Development Fund for ARC England, expanding the partner base and developing the service we offered.

Claire is now focused on developing business across all of our services, engaging new organisations, grant funding applications and building on our existing relationships.

Claire would welcome the opportunity to discuss how ARC could support your organisation and can be contacted directly on 01246 541671.