About us

We are dedicated to helping unemployed people to return to work by providing training and employment opportunities.Our range of services delivered solely by us or in partnership with others, really do change people’s lives for the better. We focus on those groups who are not accessible to mainstream organisations.

“There is no such thing as ‘hard to reach’ groups, in reality they are simply‘out of reach’ to mainstream institutions.”

Established to provide a fundraising and development resource for small charities in the disability, arts and sports field

August 2006

Opened office in Belfast

September 2006

Relocated head office to larger premises in Croydon

November 2006

Awarded Positive About Disabled People award

December 2006

Awarded Certificate of Commitment, IAG Matrix

February 2007

Became City & Guilds registered training centre

Introducing our Director - Stephen Dering

Stephen was born and grew up in Surrey. Deaf since birth, he has worked in a variety of roles, all involving changing peoples lives for the better. He now lives in Croydon and is the Chairman of Charlton Athletic Deaf football team.

Shortly after leaving university, Stephen worked for the Deputy Minister for housing at the National Assembly for Wales before moving to London to take up a post at Shelter, the national homelessness charity. Stephen became one of London's youngest Councillors in 2002, elected to represent what the Guardian newspaper described as one of the worst council estates in London.

This experience of working with people who were experiencing homelessness, drug dependency, bad housing and unemployment led to a passion of developing training and employment programmes to enable people to break out of this cycle and improve their quality of life.

After standing down from the Council in 2006, Stephen set up Dering Associates to work with small charitable organisations who needed access to fundraising support to develop their services. Following the awarding of contracts to deliver employment related training programmes, the company changed its name to Dering Employment Services Ltd to reflect its main focus