Women With Balls: Dame Rachel de Souza

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 23 December 2022

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dame Rachel de Souza is the Children’s Commissioner for England. Having spent more than 30 years in education, she grew a reputation for her unconventional but effective ways of turning poor-performing schools around and increasing pupil attendance. She was selected as Children’s Commissioner in December 2020, weeks before the Covid 19 pandemic. Since this time, she has been tracking down absent children, working on the Online Harms Bill in Westminster, and is conducting a nationwide study of the impacts of the pandemic on young people.

On the podcast, Rachel tells Katy about growing up in Scunthorpe where she came from an Irish Catholic/Ukrainian background. Being educated by the nuns in a local comprehensive school, Rachel remembers her career advice; that she ‘couldn’t wash up and would never get a husband.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is sponsored by Lloyd's Banking Group, serving Britain's communities and households for more than 250 years.
0:12.5	Hello and welcome to Women of Balls, where I, Katie Balls, speak to today's trailblazers.
0:17.8	My guest today is a champion for children's education.
0:22.9	A former head teacher, she worked in education for the last 31 years and always had unconventional but effective methods for getting
0:28.5	kids into school and turning poor performing schools around. When Michael Gave was Education
0:33.4	Secretary, he said his policy was to clone this woman 23,000 times over. He didn't quite get there.
0:40.6	But in December 2020, she was appointed as a new children's commissioner, putting her in charge
0:45.3	of children's interests and education. Since her appointment, she has worked to raise awareness
0:49.5	for how the pandemic has affected vulnerable children. My guest today is Rachel DeSuza. So Rachel, to begin in this
0:56.0	podcast, and first, thanks very much for coming into the office today. We're asking how would you
1:00.0	describe your childhood? Was it a happy one? Well, Katie. So I think definitely my childhood was happy,
1:05.3	but I'm not sure everyone around me was happy. So I think it's quite interesting in that way.
1:10.3	So I mean, I was
1:11.2	born in Scunthorpe, daughter of a steel worker, a very Irish Catholic family. I have four brothers.
1:16.8	And my mother's family were, well, my mom was a refugee. So she had Hungarian, Austrian
1:23.0	background. She was born in 45 and her mother wanted to flee the Russians in the East. And so
1:29.6	put her in an orphanage in Bavaria and came over. So, and then brought her, when she got married
1:34.7	again to a Ukrainian, brought her over when she was seven. So quite a mixed background. It's not
1:42.1	neutral because it's in a steel town. So, you know, the steelworks
1:45.4	sort of had all the prisoners of wars and attracted sort of a lot of immigrant populations. And so
1:50.2	that mix wasn't that unusual. So you grew up in Scunthorpe and as you mentioned, your father
1:55.5	was a steelworker. That was around the time of the minor strikes, wasn't it? Absolutely. I'm
	...

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