Rare Recruitment

Naomi leads a team of four with responsibility for student recruitment across UK schools and universities, generating thousands of applications to become Rare candidates. She smashed her annual target of recruiting 200 high achieving students of Black heritage despite the pandemic in autumn 2020, recruiting over 300 students in just three weeks.

Naomi manages seven of Rare;s highly competitive student development programmes, the most high profile being Target Oxbridge (TO), an intensive programme Naomi designed to help school leavers of Black heritage to make successful applications to Oxford and Cambridge universities. TO received over 1000 applications for 160 TO places in both 2020 and 2021, and TO students had an application success rate to Oxford and Cambridge of over 40% in both years, more than double the average success rate for Oxbridge applicants.


Naomi manages annual contracts in excess of £440K, including Rare's yearly agreement to attract and develop 360 ethnic minority and lower socioeconomic status candidates to the Civil Service diversity internships and Fast Stream. In 2020-21, over 500 candidates were supported through the Civil Service application process by Naomi and her team, exceeding her target by nearly 50%.

Naomi is an education policy expert, and is often approached by national media for insight on events which impact Rare's target groups. In 2019, Naomi's portrait was unveiled at her alma mater - Lincoln College, Oxford - as part of a celebration of 40 years of women at the college, and she became a Fellow of Royal Society of Arts in 2021.