Our leadership team

Angela McConville, Chief Executive

‘Parents coming together in their local communities to support other parents is one of the most impactful and far-reaching effects of the work of NCT.’

Angela lives in Oxfordshire with her young family and is a passionate advocate for the wellbeing of pregnant women and new parents. She also wholeheartedly believes in volunteering and the role of community organising in making a positive impact for local people and local places.

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She joined NCT in January 2020, having been Chief Executive of a number of charities working in community development, social and economic regeneration and heritage management. 

After an early career at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Angela has spent her working life in charities and not-for-profit enterprises. Angela’s experience ranges from managing a leading visitor attraction and world heritage site, to creating a new strategy for one of London’s largest community development trusts. Angela is a passionate and strategic charity leader with significant governance, strategy and operational experience, and over her career has built a range of dynamic partnerships and enterprises across the leisure, education and technology spaces. 

Angela has served on a number of not-for-profit Boards as a trustee and/or non-executive Director, including The London Apprenticeship Company, London’s first group apprenticeship company, City of Westminster College and the London Transport Museum, where she served as a volunteer trustee and Trading Board Director for six years. 

Angela grew up in Northern Ireland and found inspiration in the work and efforts of her family and local community to forge opportunity and create provision in the face of social and political turbulence. She studied at both Trinity College Dublin, and Henley Business School, as well as spending a year studying at the University of Paris. 

Tope Medupin, Director of Operations

Tope joins NCT with over 15 years of experience in Finance and Operations. In that time, she has partnered with senior leadership teams across publishing, music, technology and non-profit organisations at various stages of their development journey. She joined the NCT leadership team in March 2023.

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Tope started her career as a chartered accountant, spending ten years running financial accounting, planning and analysis processes, and leading teams in London and New York before taking on more generalist business operations roles.

She is excited to bring her experience of supporting ambitious teams to deliver against their goals in sustainable ways. Tope is also looking forward to working with the team at NCT to help improve outcomes for parents and children from every background, especially those most vulnerable to structural inequities. 

Tope loves the inner workings of what makes a business run and bridging the gap between big, lofty organisational missions and the real work delivered by incredible humans on the ground. She is passionate about bringing together diverse groups of people to solve complex problems and how people, processes, data and technology converge. 

She is a proud first-generation British Nigerian and mother of two daughters. Tope loves plantain, yoga, drawing, and architecture and recently built a house with her husband on a little triangular wedge in South East London.

Natasha Simpson, Director of People, Education and Inclusion

With a drive for social justice, Natasha has dedicated most of her career to working in the people function sector within charities that have a social purpose.

Natasha was delighted with the opportunity to join NCT – a charity which aspires to extend its community and volunteering reach to help and support all new and expectant parents, irrespective of their experiences, identity, background or beliefs. 

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With an educational background in psychology, Natasha began working in the people function over 20 years ago. Her work within the charity sector spans numerous national organisations with a holistic focus on social care – primarily supporting vulnerable adults and their families within the areas of substance misuse, criminal justice, mental health, housing and homelessness, skills, education and employability.  

Natasha has extensive experience in the areas of organisational growth, development and transformational change within fast changing environments. She has worked with leadership teams to successfully build inclusive cultures, with highly engaged and motivated colleagues.

After her second child and a three-year career break (wonderfully spent as a stay-at-home mum, in southern Spain) Natasha set up her own HR consultancy, before returning to the workplace a few years after that. Her most recent role was within the UK’s leading youth homelessness charity, Centrepoint.

When not working, she is very family oriented and lives an active life in the suburbs of North West London with her husband and two sons. They enjoy the outdoors and share a passion for health, wellbeing and fitness – which includes dabbling in anything from cycling, to obstacle mud runs, to hiking, half-marathons, horse riding, or even surfing!

Chris Conway, Director of Finance and Planning and Company Secretary

Chris joins NCT with over 20 years of experience gained in CFO, Finance Director and Company Secretary roles across the not-for-profit and corporate sector. He joined the NCT leadership team in April 2025.

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Chris started his career as a management accountant, spending 12 years in the financial services sector at Citibank in a number of roles specialising in management accounting, project management and financial planning and analysis in London, Paris and Sydney. Since then, Chris has worked in the not for profit (sporting) sector in senior finance leadership roles in Australia for 5 years and more recently at a number of sporting membership organisations in the UK after his return to these shores in 2016.

Passionate about social impact, Chris is a Board Trustee at a disability sporting charity where he is now Senior Independent Director after holding the role of Chair of the Governance and Finance Committee in his first term.

Chris is a Chartered Management Accountant and holds a Chartered Secretary qualification from The Governance Institute. Chris is an MBA graduate from the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM), UNSW where his studies included a semester at the NYU Stern School of Business in New York.

Chris lives in Northamptonshire with his wife and two daughters and is a keen runner.

Jaine Sykes, Director of Marketing and Engagement

Jaine joined NCT in September 2025 as Director of Marketing & Engagement. She has over 15 years’ experience in marketing and communications, leading teams at organisations such as ITV, Edelman and the BBC, where she focused on digital strategy, audience engagement and storytelling that connects with millions of people.

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Her first experience of NCT was attending an antenatal course, where the group she met became a vital lifeline of support when her son was born just before the Covid lockdown. That personal connection to NCT underpins her commitment to helping more parents find the support they need.

Jaine is particularly interested in accessibility and inclusion, both in her work and through her role as a trustee at LumoTV, a deaf-led charity which commissions and produces television content in British Sign Language for and by the deaf community.

At NCT, she leads the organisation’s marketing and engagement work, helping to strengthen awareness of NCT’s mission and ensure that parents everywhere know the charity is there for them.

She lives in Hertfordshire with her husband, young son and two much-loved rescue house rabbits.

Jessica Abelscroft, Interim Director of Marketing and Engagement

Jess has worked in the UK third sector for over 15 years, holding a range of leadership roles in national charities across Communications, Marketing, Strategy and Transformation. She founded an independent consultancy service in 2024 after the birth of her second child, and works with organisations to achieve impactful messaging and people-centred change at pace. In May 2025 she joined NCT in-house as Interim Director of Marketing and Engagement. 

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Jess is particularly passionate about how organisations can make clear, bold choices to articulate the unique value they add, and how they partner with or devolve power to others to create stronger, more joined up services for everyone. She brings a strong focus on engagement, believing that staff, volunteers and service users must be involved in shaping the future so we can better serve communities. With extensive experience in federated and networked charities with frontline support services, she tries to create spaces where expertise from all parts of an organisation can come together to drive innovation and get things done.

Originally from a very small farming village in the United States, Jess lived and worked in Chicago and New York as a journalist before calling London home. She lives with her husband, two young kids and one elderly cat in Walthamstow, where she volunteers as Company Secretary for a community hub and plays lawn bowls. She is active in the alumni network of Leaders Plus, an organisation that advocates for a world where people can have big careers and small children, and a former trustee of CharityComms.