Oration: Dame Stephanie Shirley
Dame Stephanie Shirley arrived in England as an unaccompanied child refugee from Germany; she was 5 years old. Children react in a variety of ways to such experiences, and in young Stephanie’s case it made her resolute: she formulated the ambition to demonstrate that her life had been worth saving. In 1951 Stephanie was naturalised, and Miss Buchthal became Miss Brook. She attended SirJohnCassCollege, one of two schools maintained by a remarkable educational foundation in Inner London; little did Miss Brook know that she was destined to create a series of even more remarkable educational foundations.
After taking a degree at University of London, Miss Brook married, and Stephanie Shirley, as she had become, decided to start a business that would use the brainpower of mothers who were looking for part-time work; we would now call it an IT outsourcing company. She created a workplace, otherwise known as her dining room table, and with an investment of £6 started a company that was known as Freelance Programmers. The company grew, not merely because it was a good idea, as Dame Stephanie is wont to say, but because she brought to bear on it the full force of her formidable intelligence and apparently inexhaustible energy. In 1988 the company became known as F.I. Group, and in May 2001 it was rebranded as Xansa.
Xansa is one of the great success stories of postwar Britain, and its success is in one important respect unique: it was built by women. Indeed, until equal opportunities legislation outlawed discrimination on grounds of gender, the company’s directors and employees were all women. It is not without irony that legislation designed to end discrimination against women put an end to a policy that promoted the interests of women. Perhaps more importantly, the success of the company afforded a glimpse of a world in which women might be fully empowered; what a greatly improved place it would be.
The core activity of Dame Stephanie’s company in the early years was designing and building bespoke applications software. It has now diversified, and its 6,400 employees work in six sectors (banking, insurance, telecommunications, utilities, the retail sector and the public sector); IT outsourcing remains a core business, but Xansa also offers business and technology consulting, IT services and business process outsourcing.
Dame Stephanie retired in 1993, by which time she had become one of Britain’s wealthiest women. This position has been maintained despite her efforts to give away money to the cause in which she believes; she has so far managed to give away more than £50 million pounds, but still appears in the annual rich list. In retirement she has served on a variety of corporate boards, and she has developed an interest in the use of IT in the voluntary sector, but the principal focus of her life is autism. Her autistic son Giles died at the age of 35 in 1998.
The principal vehicles for her work in autism are the Kingwood Trust, the Prior’s Court Foundation and the Shirley Foundation. The focus of the Kingwood Trust is what we would now call social inclusion. Those with autism or significant learning difficulties sometimes, through no fault of their own, resort to antisocial behaviour and find themselves excluded and unhappy; in the past such people have been consigned to locked wards. The Kingwood Trust aims to create supportive residential clusters in ordinary houses close to local shops and services, and to help the residents to develop sharing skills and self-confidence.
The focus of the Prior’s Court Foundation is a residential and day school in Berkshire for children aged 5 to 19 who have been diagnosed on the autistic spectrum. In addition to this work, which is centred on care, education and training, the Foundation offers a very serious diagnostic and assessment facility, a training and research centre and an out-reach service working with local communities. It also acts as a force for change at a national level, both in raising awareness of autistic spectrum disorders and lobbying for greater access to services designed to assist those with autism.
The third organisation, the Shirley Foundation, may in the long term prove to be the most important of all. This Foundation is focussed on scientific research into the causes of autism. Its ambition, which is Dame Stephanie’s ambition, is to understand the causes of autism by 2014 and to halve its global costs by 2020. This ambition feeds in turn feeds into her latest project, which is a global research programme to raise the millions needed for a virtual medical research centre to investigate the causes of autism. The achievement of this goal will be of enormous consequence, not only for those of us who have connections with the autistic community, its carers and its professionals, but for our address as a society to this most perplexing of disabilities.
Mr Chancellor, on the recommendation of the Senate and the Council, I present to you Dame Stephanie Shirley, that you may confer upon her the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws.
G Campbell, Public Orator