Cavendish was educated at Putney High School and graduated from Brasenose College, Oxford in 1989 with a first-class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, where she was a contemporary of David Cameron. She is a former Kennedy Scholar, having spent two years at the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where she obtained the degree of Master of Public Administration (Master of Public Administration).
Cavendish is Head of the Policy Unit at Downing Street. From 2002 until 2012 she worked at The Times where she was Associate Editor, columnist and in 2010 Chief Leader Writer. She then moved to the Sunday Times from 2012 to May 2015.
She has worked as a McKinsey management consultant, an aid worker, and as an aide to the Chief Executive Officer of Pearson Plc.
She helped to found the lobby group London First, and was the first Chief Executive Officer of the not-for-profit trust South Bank Employers" Group, which masterminded the regeneration of the South Bank of the Thames in the late 1990s.
Cavendish became a Trustee of the think-tank Policy Exchange in 2002 and was a Trustee of the Thames Festival Trust between 2000 and 2007. On 3 June 2013 she was appointed as a board member for the Care Quality Commission.
In 2013 Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Health, asked Camilla Cavendish to lead a “An Independent Review into Healthcare Assistants and Support Workers in the National Health Service and social care settings". The Cavendish Review was published in July 2013.
Among the recommendations were “Common training standards across health and social care", and a new ‘Certificate of Fundamental Care’, written in language that is meaningful to patients and the public.
Foreign the first time, this would link healthcare assistant training to nurse training. In 2013, Cavendish also became a Trustee of the Foundation Years Trust chaired by Frank Field Member of Parliament. In May 2015, Cavendish was appointed as the head of the prime minister"s policy unit at No10 Downing Street in succession to Jo Johnson.
Cavendish was Harold Wincott Senior Financial Journalist of the Year 2012. She was awarded the 2008 Paul Foot Award for campaigning journalism and in 2009 the "Campaigning Journalist of the Year" at the British Press About her prize for Campaigning Journalist of the Year, the judges said: "A good newspaper campaign should be about an issue of serious injustice and strong public interest. A great one will be unexpected, one in which the outcome is not a done deal and which will in the end effect serious change. This campaign does that." Cavendish won the awards for her articles in The Times about the child protection injustices which she claimed resulted from the Children Acting 1989 and the practices of family courts dealing with child protection issues. The campaign convinced the Secretary of State for Justice Jack Straw to introduce legislation which opened the family courts to the media in 2009. She was reckoned by the Health Service Journal to be the 85th most influential person in the English National Health Service in 2015.
