Barnardo's Chief Executive
Martin Narey
Martin Narey, Chief Executive of Barnardo’s, has previously worked as Director General of the Prison Service, Chief Executive of the National Offender Management Service and a Permanent Secretary at the Home Office. When running prisons he was widely recognised for his commitment to transforming and motivating prison staff, and for his clarity of vision and determination to drive through improvements in the way in which prisoners were treated. He established the Decency Agenda in prisons, which led to significant improvements in prison conditions.
He graduated in 1977 from what was then Sheffield Polytechnic, where he is now a Visiting Professor, and began a career in the Health Service. In 1982, he resigned to train as a prison governor. He worked in a local prison, a borstal and a top security prison before taking a number of posts in Whitehall. He was appointed as the youngest ever Director General of the Prison Service in 1998.
He has a deep and passionate concern for disadvantaged young people. It is this thread which brought him to Barnardo’s, which works with 115,000 disadvantaged children and young people with a staff of over six and a half thousand and eleven thousand volunteers.
Martin joined Barnardo's in October 2005 and has led it through a period of sustained growth and succeeded in significantly improving its influencing capacity. There have been significant achievements in changing government policy on issues such as children in care, asylum seeking children and the supervision of child sex offenders. But the campaigning priority for Barnardo’s has been child poverty. To this end, Martin chairs the End Child Poverty Coalition.
In 2004, shortly before leaving the Civil Service, Martin was the recipient of the Chartered Management Institute’s Gold Medal for leadership, a prestigious annual award recognising a single individual. Martin was the first public sector recipient of the medal for ten years. He has Honorary Doctorates from Sheffield Hallam and Teesside Universities and is a visiting Professor at Sheffield Hallam.
