Tina Stowell is a Conservative peer and Chairman of the House of Lords’ Communications & Digital Select Committee. She is a former Cabinet Minister, was Leader of the House of Lords until July 2016, and was Chair of the Charity Commission from 2018 to 2021.
Before joining the House of Lords soon after the 2010 General Election, she spent nine years at the BBC where she was latterly Head of Corporate Affairs. Before that she ran William Hague’s office when he was Leader of the Opposition. As a civil servant she worked at the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, the British Embassy in Washington, and in the Downing Street Press Office when John Major was Prime Minister. She sits on the Boards of ABTA, the travel sector trade body, and Impellam Group plc, a multinational staffing and managed services business.
Tina was born and brought up in Beeston, just outside of Nottingham. After leaving school at 16 she attended the local FE college and then moved to London aged 18 to join the civil service as a secretary.
Philip is Chair of Impero Software, the UK’s leading supplier of network management and monitoring/filtering solutions for schools.
Prior to that he was chair of CABI, the UK-based intergovernmental organisation which supports subsistence and small-holding farmers around the world. He was also chair of EdComs, the UK’s largest communications and marketing agency specialising in education; chair of GL Education, the leading provider of educational tests and assessments; and chair of Rising Stars UK, the second largest primary school publisher in the UK. Before all that he was chief executive of Hodder Education, a Debating Matters sponsor and one of the top three school publishers in the UK. He was also chair of Book Source, and a director of Nelson Croom, Encyclopaedia Britannica (London), and Yale University Press (London). In the voluntary sector he was chair of Book Aid International, the charity that equips libraries in sub-Saharan African countries with textbooks and readers that would not be affordable otherwise. He has been an associate of the Academy of Ideas for more than 15 years, and was involved in the Debating Matters competition from a very early stage in its development. He was awarded an MBE for services to educational publishing in 2010.
Retired paediatrician; author The End of Apartheid?
Jennifer was a community paediatrician in Glasgow for over 30 years, and a leading clinician in the South Glasgow autism diagnostic service. She studied for a science degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and was the first woman to be an SRC (Student Representative Council) president at a South African University. Jennifer moved to the UK in the early 1980s, during one of the darkest periods for opponents of the apartheid regime.
Jane is the chief operation officer at The Passage – a charity aimed at ending homelessness. Jane is also the convenor of the Academy of Ideas’ Parents Forum which was founded in October 2006 to examine why the family has become such a focus in contemporary society and what the consequences of that might be. Jane wrote the foreword to Standing Up to Supernanny which challenges the notion that today’s parents are hopeless and lazy.
Dr Piers Benn is a visiting lecturer in philosophy at the University of Roehampton and has recently taught at Heythrop College, University of London and Fordham University London Centre. Previously he held lectureships in philosophy at the universities of Leicester, St Andrews and Leeds, followed by medical ethics at Imperial College London and King’s College London. His many interests include philosophy of religion, ethics and philosophy of psychiatry, with a particular focus on problems raised by sociopathy and addiction.
During the 1990s, he organised seminars for students in Poland and the Czech Republic, in collaboration with host institutions struggling to rebuild education after the communist period. He writes for both academic and wider audiences and has made several appearances on the British media, including Night Waves (Radio 3), The Moral Maze (Radio 4), News Hour (BBC World Service), Channel Four News and Sky News.
educational and child psychologist; founder of Not the Easy Way
Dr. Peter D’Lima is an educational and child psychologist and co-founder of Not The Easy Way, an organisation developed to help young people face the inevitable challenges of life. Part of the mission of Not The Easy Way is to support young people to be able to express themselves and engage in discussions around complex topics that affect them and society. Peter has also conducted research in the realms of social media use and radicalisation prevention. Prior to his role as a psychologist, Peter studied Italian and was a primary school teacher in London.
Lecturer in Civil Engineering, Newcastle University; Director, The Great Debate
Dr Caspar Hewett is the director of The Great Debate, a community organisation that has maintained a space for public debate in the North East of England since 1998 (http://www.thegreatdebate.org.uk/). He is a lecturer in the School of Engineering, Degree Programme Director for the international EuroAquae Masters Programme and Academic Lead of Natural Environment Research Council FLOOD Centre for Doctoral Training at Newcastle University. He has over thirty years of research experience in industry and academia and has taught and lectured a variety of subjects including Global Water Resources, numerical methods, hydraulics, catchment management, market research techniques, engineering ethics, philosophy of science and environmental issues. He is an associate member of the Engineering and Physical Research Council (EPSRC) Peer Review College and his current research focuses on engineering interventions to improve the environment.
Caspar was a founder member of the North East of England’s United Nations Regional Centre of Expertise in Education for Sustainable Development and was Director of its co-ordinating body from 2011 to 2013. He is passionate about development and a champion of the notion of progress and has written about topics from the European Convention on Human Rights to Condorcet.
Olivia Utley is a political journalist who was previously news editor at Reaction. She has written for the Times, the Telegraph, City AM, CapX, Reaction, the Sun and Standpoint, and is a regular paper reviewer for BBC and Sky News.
She has a particular interest in intergenerational inequality, voting demographics, and the appeal of the far left to young people.
She was previously deputy editor at The Article, the deputy leader writer and head of PR at The Sun and is now Assistant Comment Editor at The Telegraph, as well as commissioning editor for Boisdale Life Magazine.
Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Derby
Dennis is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Derby and the Director of the campaign group Academics For Academic Freedom (AFAF). Among his many publications is the controversial and best-selling book The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education once described as ‘one of the most important books to have been written in at least the last twenty years in that crucial area where philosophy, policy and practice coincide’. He has been involved in Debating Matters since its inception and was labelled the ‘Simon Cowell’ of judges but, like Cowell, he has mellowed over the years!
Belinda de Lucy is a former MEP for the Brexit Party where she was a member of the Women’s Rights (FEMM) Committee in the EU Parliament. She has a Masters in EU Law and is a regular political commentator on Talk Radio specialising in topics such as the EU, democracy and free speech. Belinda is also the mother of 4 teenage daughters.
