Helen Boaden (born 1 March 1956) is a British former broadcasting executive who spent more than 30 years working for the BBC, including as Director of Radio between February 2013 and September 2016. Boaden is a Fellow of The Radio Academy, and in May 2019 she joined the board of the UK Statistics Authority for a period of three years. Early life Boaden was born on 1 March 1956 in Colchester in Essex. Her father was an FE lecturer in geography and then worked for a teaching union. She says that she came "from one of those families where there was quite a lot of shouting and plates whizzing through the air". Boaden says that she found school "a great relief from home life because it was calm and ordered". She was educated at Rushmere junior school and Northgate Grammar School (now Northgate High School) in the large county town of Ipswich in Suffolk, and at Cedars Grammar School (now Cedars Upper School) in the town of Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire, followed by the University of Sussex, where she gained a BA Honours in English literature, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1999, where she gained an MBA. Life and career Boaden began her career in 1978 as a care assistant with disturbed adolescents in the London Borough of Hackney. The following year, she became a journalist with the New York City radio station WBAI. On returning to the UK, she took a course in radio journalism at the London College of Printing (now the London College of Communication). After work at Radio Tees and Radio Aire, Boaden joined the BBC in 1983 as a news producer with Radio Leeds. From there, she joined BBC Radio 4 as a reporter on the File on 4 series, then as its editor from 1991. She worked from the BBC in Manchester as a presenter for Woman's Hour and later presented other documentaries for Radio 4, and for the Brass Tacks political programme on BBC 2. In 1997, Boaden became the BBC's Head of Business Programmes, then in 1998 Head of BBC Current Affairs – the first woman to hold this position. She was Controller of BBC Radio 4 from March 2000 until 20 September 2004, superseded by Mark Damazer. She became Controller of BBC7 in 2002, when the station was launched. In 2004, she succeeded Richard Sambrook as