Lived Experience Speaker | SEND Advocate | Tower Hamlets Women's Advocate 2025 | Former Special School Teacher | Author

Sarah Withers works with families, professionals, and organisations at the intersection of trauma recovery, neurodivergence, disability, and broken systems - helping families and survivors rebuild a life they're excited to live.

I'm a former specialist school teacher with experience in special schools for young people with SEMH needs, a qualified NLP mindset coach, a published author, and the Tower Hamlets Women's Advocate of the Year 2025. I Chair my local ward panel, sit on the Tower Hamlets Safer Neighbourhood Board, and serve as a school governor with curriculum and careers responsibility.

I'm also a disabled single mother, home educating my AuDHD daughter, and a survivor — of violence, of a system that repeatedly failed my child, of domestic abuse, of a heart failure diagnosis at 30 and two heart operations, and of the kind of childhood that most people wouldn't survive intact.

I spent years giving my expertise away for free - to community boards, to support groups, to parents fighting CAMHS and schools in Facebook groups at midnight. I now deliver that expertise as a speaker, writer, and consultant / coach to families, professionals and organisations.

My work sits at the intersection of:

• NLP Mindset, resilience, and rebuilding after trauma
• Child criminal exploitation, youth violence, VAWG, and early intervention
• SEND education and neurodivergence
• Health inequality, living a full life with disabilities and chronic illness