STEPHEN SMITH: And now we come to our Honorary Award. These are awarded by the University in recognition of somebody who has made a very significant contribution in their particular field. I now have great pleasure in inviting Mr Russ Langley, Chief Performance, Strategy and Operations Officer, to give the commendation for the conferment of the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Education to Shaun Dellenty.
RUSS LANGLEY: Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, Pro-Chancellor, Vice-Lord Lieutenant, High Sheriff, honoured guests, graduands of 2022 and all our guests here today. It gives me great pleasure to be presenting today Shaun Dellenty for the Award of Honorary Doctor of Education.
Shaun is a multi-award winning educator, trainer, inspirational speaker, blogger, author and pioneering advocate for LGBT+ inclusion in education. His influence has been ground-breaking. He has been named as one of the top 100 influential LGBT+ people in the UK and was designated a point of light by the Prime Minister for services to the LGBT+ community in 2016.
Shaun was educated in the East Midlands where he was a victim of severe homophobic bullying at school. After leaving state education, he worked first as a civil servant and then as a professional actor, presenter and voice-over artist, appearing in various television programs, such as 'Peak Practice', 'Crimewatch' and 'Emmerdale'. In 1996 he qualified as a primary school teacher and in 2012 he qualified as a Headteacher.
Shaun remained closeted as a teacher, as a direct result of witnessing homophobia in school staff rooms, classrooms and playgrounds. But he decided to come out to his whole school community in 2009 after his school at the time found 75 percent of its primary age pupils were experiencing daily homophobia. In response he founded Inclusion For All, a small charitable organisation aiming to train teachers and affect organisational change in communities, schools and other educational contexts, and he began telling his personal story of surviving bullying across the UK.
Since then, he has worked with countless UK and Overseas schools, businesses, charities and teacher training faculties. He has also worked at education committee and government policy level with endorsements from the Department of Education, Amnesty International, the Church of England and the Faiths and Beliefs Forum.
He is a regular speaker in the media and at national events and his blue interview book, 'Celebrating Difference: A whole-school approach to LGBT+ inclusion' was recommended in the House of Lords. His book includes testimonials from many influential people such as Peter Tatchell and Michael Cashman, and also includes comments from university trainee teachers and teaching staff. Shaun regularly delivers sessions to our PGCE trainees and has worked closely with our senior lecturers in our Institute of Education. He continues to be a huge inspiration to our staff and our students.
Shaun is celebrating here today with his mum, Daphne and his husband, Michael.
Chancellor, in recognition of his achievements as an inspirational campaigner, speaker, and trainer in the field of LGBT+ rights and his support for the University, we are delighted to award Shaun Dellenty the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Education.
SHAUN DELLENTY: It's never easy to say LGBT+, is it? I say it all the time and I still struggle. Good morning, good afternoon, good afternoon, good morning, good morning everybody! How are you doing?
So, I've just been sat there listening to so much inspiration and just being here in this room with all of you and reflecting on what you've all been through to get to this point I was really struggling to keep it together. So, I just want to say how amazed I am and how proud of you I am and how brilliant I think you all are, so give yourselves a really big hand. Give yourself a clap.
So, the speech bit: Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, Pro-Chancellor, Vice-Lord Lieutenant, High Sheriff, honoured guests, inspirational graduands of 2022 and all gathered guests, it's a huge honour and privilege to be here in your company today. So some reflections, and maybe some learning as well.
53 years ago, the universe chose to make me gay. By five years old I knew who I was and what I was, despite not having the words gay, or homosexual to describe myself. When I finally did acquire such words, mainly to explain myself to other people, these came in the form of homophobic slurs from other people, quite often punctuated by slaps and punches.
Through the 1970s and 1980s I was repeatedly sent the message by other people that simply existing, as my authentic human self, wasn't a good thing. LGBT+ people like me were, and sadly often still are, labelled as bad, unnatural, evil, even a cause of disease. Happy days!
Against the backdrop of section 28 and the initial onset of HIV and AIDS, homophobic bullying resulted in me deciding that education was the least important thing in the world. Instead, surviving day to day became my priority in a secondary school not too far from here.
Fast losing hope and just prior to my finals in 1987, I exited state education for good, so I thought. And I lacked one single lesson, one single reading book, one single assembly or one single sex education lesson to prepare me for life as an adult, LGBT+ male, as did generations of young LGBT+ people. Now we might carry bullying with us, sometimes across decades, and sometimes as I've learned via my advocacy, even across entire lifetimes. Only by migrating geographically and by forming my chosen family and friends was I initially able to fully accept myself, thus empowering me to make conscious choices, not to let past prejudice and bullying define my future.
So, I returned to education on my terms, training as a class teacher then a school leader, because learning is after all life long, or it can be if we keep an open mind and an open heart. And as you've heard in 2009 surveys in my primary school revealed a serious problem with homophobic bullying and the LGBT+ training program I devised in response, I first delivered in my own school then across the UK and now to around 25 countries. For whatever reason it seemed to connect, it seemed to touch hearts and minds and that's an unexpected journey but it's a huge privilege to be on a journey.
However, I wish that journey wasn't necessary in the first place and I'm really grateful to organisations such as the University of Derby who welcomed my approach from the outset really.
Sometimes life presents us with problems and we have choices in terms of how we respond. For me the choice was simply one of safeguarding and compassion for all, not merely some young people. And my subsequent advocacy around the world has revealed to me an unexpected and unacceptable measure of human suffering, underlining the power of education to positively transform lives and the key role education plays in working proactively with our human potential for prejudice and bias; it's in us all, me too!
So, my teenage self was actually wrong. Education is in fact the most important thing in the world provided it's fully inclusive. So, what have I learned? So much, so much! But I've learned the power of making choices rooted in kindness, in compassion and empathy and courage, in respect of the rights, the dignity and the joyful uniqueness of other diverse human beings. I've learned that we have to show patience and allow people to go on journeys so that they can work through their own feelings towards human diversity, and I think that's okay.
I've seen so much progress in my 54 years, but I now see that progress is rarely linear and that rights and progress can actually go backwards, and as you go out into the world I would invite you to be mindful of that, and pay heed to that. And I've learned that our divisions will never be healed via Twitter and social media, but by face to face, nuanced, complex debate, initially grounded in what we have in common, our human potential for kindness and compassion.
So graduands of 2022 please choose to keep learning, choose to be kind and choose to be authentically you. We could all be better for ourselves and for this boiling planet and in conclusion, thank you to the universe and thank you to my parents for blessing me with being who I am and, yes, for being gay. It enables me to see the world through a different lens, rainbow-coloured, of course!
When you're gay everything you've got has got rainbows on it. Thank you to my beautiful husband, Michael, for his support and love. Thank you to my brave mum, who's battled through any number of health problems to be here today. I'm so pleased that you can be here and I love you very much.
And also thank you to my friend David Tinsley for his support and my late father Richard Dellenty for his love and support too. Most of all thank you to the University of Derby. To everybody here today, go forth, educate, be fabulous and be kind. Thank you so much!