Shaun Dellenty
Shaun Dellenty NPQH, FCCT, FRSA (he/him) is a multi-award- winning educator and advocate for LGBT+ inclusive education, widely reported as the one of the first UK gay primary school leaders to publicly ‘come out’ in the international press back in 2009. In education since 1996 as teacher, school leader, school improvement advisor and initial teacher trainer, Shaun now works as a school-based equalities lead whilst continuing his global advocacy.
Over 90,000 UK education professionals have experienced Shaun’s student talks and staff training events. Shaun’s global training reach extends to twenty-five countries. Shaun supports numerous national and international organisations including Church of England, NSPCC, NAHT, Show Racism The Red Card, National College and Amnesty and advised at government/ policy level.
Shaun wrote the acclaimed Bloomsbury book ‘Celebrating Difference- A Whole School Approach to LGBT+ Inclusion.’ Shaun advises the Global Equality Collective. In 2016 designated a ‘Point of Light’ for services to LGBT+ and education communities by the Prime Minister and was named one of the 100 most influential LGBT+ people in the UK. In 2020 named top twenty global diversity leads by The Guardian. Features variously in media: BBC, Channel Four, Sky News, ITV Daybreak and recently Radio 4’s ‘Soul Music.’ Wrote a section for the recent book from Diverse Educators ‘Manifesto.’
Mabel Davis CBE
Mabel was honoured with a CBE by the Queen for contributions to the Education of deaf children in February 2007. She was the first deaf person to achieve the status of Headteacher in the UK. She was also the Disability Commission’s Representative and Founder Member of the General Teaching Council.
Throughout her career the main thrust of her interest was on raising standards of literacy, with a focus on written English skills, papers on which she presented at various International Congress for the Education of the Deaf (ICED). She also contributed to the pioneering of Inclusion in schools for children with a disability.
On her retirement in 2012 she continued to work by writing articles for professional educational journals that were published, such as the British Association of Teachers of the Deaf (BATOD). Mabel’s book, ‘The Eyes That Hear’, published by Olympia is due to be released later this year.
Jonathan Charlesworth
Jonathan is Executive Director of the multi-award-winning charity EACH - Educational Action Challenging Homophobia - with over 30 years' experience in consultancy, training delivery and resources on homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying. In 2019 he co-developed Wales's statutory anti-bullying guidance for its Government's schools and is the writer of national guidance to schools for the Department for Education.
EACH is a registered charity working closely with the Health, Crown Prosecution, Police and Education Services. It was voted Charity of the Year 2018-19 by the Ben Cohen Stand Up Foundation.
Andrew Copson
Andrew Copson FRSA, FCMI, MCIPR is the Chief Executive of Humanists UK and President of Humanists International. Andrew is a Humanist leader and writer.
He has worked for a number of civil and human rights organisations throughout his career in his capacity as executive committee member, director or trustee and has represented Humanist organisations before the House of Commons, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the United Nations. As a prominent spokesperson for the Humanist movement in the United Kingdom he is a frequent contributor to newspaper articles, news items, television and radio programmes and regularly speaks to Humanist and secular groups throughout Britain
Andrew has contributed to several books on secularism and humanism and is the author of Secularism: Politics, Religion, and Freedom.
Andrew Moffat MBE
Andrew works at Green Meadow Primary School and is Personal Development Lead at Excelsior Multi Academy Trust in Birmingham, England. He is the author of several books and educational resources, including the No Outsiders programme, an approach to teaching primary school-aged children about diversity and tolerance, for which he was listed as a top 10 finalist in the Global Teacher Prize 2019.
Andrew was awarded an MBE in 2017 for services to equality in education, “Hero of the year 2019” by the European Diversity Awards and “Role Model of the year” by Pink News.
Diana Ohene-Darko
With over a decade of wide-ranging experience in education leadership in London, Diana works to promote and defend the teaching profession, champion equality and equity of outcomes, and strengthen children’s rights and their mental health and well-being. As an executive member of the NAHT and their Leaders for Race Equality network, Diana offers a positive voice for workforce equality and representation, raising the profile of protected characteristics as a whole and of women in particular.
Pranav Patel
Pran has 17 years of teaching experience working recently as an assistant principal. He has an exciting career in leadership; leading standards; behaviour; data; professional development, and curriculum. His NPQSL project was to lead whole-school coaching and has been a successful coach for over a decade. Pran has suffered from depression, anxiety and sleeplessness for much of his life; he firmly believes that we should accept and embrace these issues as illnesses. As such he firmly stands as a mental health advocate, he recently featured in the BBC documentary ‘Why teaching is making me ill’ and has spoken openly about the pressure of the education sector.
As a man of colour, Pran ascribes as a member of the ‘Global Majority’. While at university in the year 2000 he started his journey on the anti-racist road. In his inspirational TEDx talk ‘Decolonise the Curriculum’ he describes the moment he realised that the world was tiered away from an authentic truth and that started with the school curriculum. In this vein he recently featured in the Sky News Film ‘Slavery in Britain: What don’t we know?’ Alongside Prof Davide Olugosa, Prof Christopher J Brown, Prof Diana Paton and Prof Olivette Otele.
Dr Rebecca Wood
Rebecca is a former teacher and autism education practitioner who is a Senior Lecturer in Special Education at the University of East London and a visiting researcher at King's College London. She completed her PhD in autism and education at the University of Birmingham where she was also Project Manager of the Transform Autism Education project, a tri-national teacher training scheme, funded by the European Commission. Rebecca was subsequently a postdoctoral Fellow at the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King's, where she was funded by the ESRC.
Her book Inclusive Education for Autistic Children: Helping Children and Young People to Learn and Flourish in the Classroom is published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers.