Sarah Brown honoured

She received her Doctor of Letters at the University of Brighton’s winter awards in the Brighton Dome. The university’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor Chris Pole described her as "a global force for good".

Ms Brown - President of children's charity Theirworld - campaigns for the right of girls and boys to have access to schooling and, to this end, she said, the war in Syria was posing one of the greatest educational challenges of the 21st century.

She said: "The conflict is now in its fifth year. Families have been forced to flee and we have seen during the past 12 months, thousands taking  perilous voyages across the Mediterranean to try to seek new opportunities.

“People are risking their lives but to stay in the region and particularly in Syria's neighbouring countries of Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, they need hope that there is opportunity and a future - hope that they can one day return to their country. Education can give them that hope.

“We try to find ways that children can go to school in those countries, starting with a double shift system where local children are able to go to school in the morning and when they go home the Syrian children can use the same classroom.

"It has been successful in Lebanon. Now we are hopeful that the scheme can be rolled out further afield and a million refugee children will have a school to go to."

Ms Brown, who is also Executive Chair of the Global Business Coalition for Education, said she was confident that Governments across the world and business would create the funding and make this happen.

Her charity, she said, has co-founded A World at School and the rapidly-growing #UpForSchool campaign, led by hundreds of Global Youth Ambassadors from more than 80 countries, and supported by celebrities and politicians including the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Its petition aims to hold world leaders to account for the promise of universal primary education. More than 10 million people have already signed and shared with friends the call for leaders everywhere to take action to ensure that all children go to school and learn.

Ms Brown, wife of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, said this showed people cared, adding: “Activism is one of the key ingredients in delivering change.”

She told the audience she relished coming to the University of Brighton. She said: “One of the things that is so special about this university, apart from it having an excellent female Vice-Chancellor (Professor Debra Humphris), is that you open your heart and your facilities to enable students from all walks of life and all corners of the globe to be able to come here.”

Professor Pole, the University of Brighton’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor, said: “For some spouses of Prime Ministers this in itself would be a full-time role, an achievement in itself, but in Sarah’s case it is almost incidental.

“Her dedication, hard work and commitment to healthcare and youth education has earned her respect and admiration throughout the country and indeed the world.”

In 2002, he said, Ms Brown founded Theirworld, a global children’s charity which began groundbreaking research into safe pregnancy and childbirth. It has grown to champion child healthcare and children’s right to go to school.

He said: “With this impressive list of credentials is seems rather an understatement to describe Sarah Brown as a campaigner for health and education – she is so much more.

“It is not an overstatement to describe Sarah and her organisation that she has founded and led so successfully a beacon of hope for children around the world, a passionate crusader for children’s rights to education, and a global force for good.”