Earlier today the Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza received an honorary doctorate from Liverpool Hope University. Speaking to graduates Dame Rachel delivered the following speech:
Chancellor, esteemed faculty, graduates, families, friends.
Thank you. I am deeply honoured to accept this doctorate.
It’s not just that it’s wonderful to receive such an award – though of course it is.
It’s that I get to receive it from this faculty, in front of all of you; the people who will in the very near future enter the children’s workforce.
In front of me sit social workers, teachers.
Those for whom their work will be their love made manifest.
Something I have heard, and you will hear, is this: ‘Children are the future’.
Mentally challenge that whenever you hear it.
When I think about what this role has taught me, one truth stands above all others: children are not the citizens of tomorrow.
They are citizens today.
They feel joy today, they suffer today, they hope today.
And every single day we delay in protecting them, in listening to them, in building a world worthy of them, is a day we cannot get back.
I have sat with children in hospital wards, in courtrooms, in classrooms, and in the quiet corners of homes where no one thought to ask them what they needed.
There is an observation I return to often, from the writer G.K. Chesterton.
He noticed that a small child, delighted by something wonderful, will ask an adult to repeat it again and again.
This, he argues, is not because they are bored, or silly.
It is because of their inexhaustible appetite for joy. He suggested that this “abounding vitality” in children might actually reflect something truer about the world than our grown-up weariness does: that perhaps it is not the child who lacks perspective, but the adult who has simply stopped paying attention to what is good.
That observation has shaped how I do this work.
Children do not need us to hurry them past their own delight and curiosity.
They need us to protect the conditions in which that vitality can keep saying “again”.
The safety, stability, the freedom to be fully and unhurriedly a child.
May we all keep learning from children how to say “again”: to notice the good in front of us, and to never grow too tired to protect it.
The honour of this doctorate is not because of what I have done as Children’s Commissioner.
It is not policy papers, hard fought wins with government.
It is that I get to stand here today and feel part of the tapestry of those who will work for the betterment of children.
I have less than one year left in office.
Now it is your turn.
To the graduates here today: whatever field you enter, you will meet children along your way.
As patients, as students, as neighbours, as your own sons and daughters one day.
I ask only this of you: look at them not as unfinished adults, but as whole people already, deserving your full attention and your full respect.
Thank you.
