She joins UCAS from Worcestershire County Council, where she was also Chief Executive, and succeeds Mary Curnock Cook.
Clare started her career in production management for Rank Hovis McDougall, before joining Deloitte and leading IT-enabled change programmes for government departments, including the Department of Education, and well-known brands.
For seven years, she led the delivery and deployment of major IT implementations across the NHS, before joining Worcestershire County Council in 2010, becoming its Chief Executive in 2014.
She said she was looking forward to the new challenge: "I am really excited to be joining UCAS at such an important time for the organisation as it gears up to supporting the thousands of students receiving their exam results this summer," she said.
"UCAS has a crucial role to play in helping students to make well-informed choices about their futures and enabling universities and colleges to recruit and select the qualified students they want.
"I’m looking forward to working with an excellent team at UCAS and with universities, colleges, teachers, and students to deliver the next generation of services to support students and higher education."
Clare is a graduate of both the University of Hull and the Open University, and previously an independent governor at the University of Wolverhampton.
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Notes to editors
About UCAS
UCAS, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, is a charity and the UK’s shared admissions service for higher education. We manage applications from around 700,000 applicants each year for full-time undergraduate courses at around 380 universities and colleges across the UK.
For more information, please contact communications@ucas.ac.uk or call the External Relations Team on 01242 545 469.