Hester Started as a teacher of English in a comprehensive in North Yorkshire, but made the transition to Special Education in 1997. From 1997 to 2008, she worked in an independent specialist special school for children with vision impairments, teaching English through the medium of Large Print and Braille, and contributing to the life of the school by supporting the development of D of E Award Scheme programmes for children with VI, directing and producing school plays and other productions, supporting foreign trips and working as Head of Sixth Form, with a particular focus on supporting young people with vision impairments to make a positive transition to higher study or into the workplace.
From 2008 to 2009, she worked for RNIB supporting and maintaining a peripatetic QTVI service across different London Authorities. In 2009, she moved to Cardiff Local Authority to manage and lead the peripatetic Support Service for Vision Impairment. Whilst there, she undertook study for the QTMSI PGDip, and developed a service for identifying and supporting children with MSI (deafblind).
A big part of this role was the capacity-building of the Local Authority systems to recognise this group of learners as unique, and to ensure that their specific needs were recognised and supported effectively. She also developed a programme to begin to count, and to learn more about the challenges facing this group of learners, with an emphasis on identifying ways of measuring progress and of finding out more about numbers and causes of Deafblindness.