Three Sidney alumni awarded in King’s Birthday Honours

Shalni Arora (Natural Sciences, 1989) was awarded an OBE for services to Charity and to Philanthropy. Robert Peal (History, 2007) was awarded an MBE for services to education. Nick Poole (Modern and Medieval Languages, 1992) was awarded an OBE for services to Libraries, to the Arts and to Museums.

From left to right: Shalni Arora OBE, Robert Peal MBE, Nick Poole OBE.

Shalni Arora OBE

Shalni Arora is CEO of Savannah Wisdom, a private family charitable foundation, and an investor in life science businesses.

Following graduation, Shalni qualified as an accountant at Arthur Andersen. She joined AstraZeneca as an accountant before co-founding DxS Limited, a venture capital-backed, personalised medicine spin-out company.

Shalni is a Non-Executive Director of Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, where she chairs the Innovation Committee, focused on the use of new technologies to advance child healthcare. She is a founding Trustee of Belong - the Cohesion and Integration Network, Vice-Chair of the British Asian Trust and Chair of its Finance and Risk Committee, a member of the Network for Social Change and a council member of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. She also works for several charities and not-for-profit organisations through her own foundation.

Shalni has previously received the Beacon Award for Philanthropy and a Medal of Honour from the University of Manchester for her contribution to the city.

‘I am absolutely delighted to receive this Honour which recognises the hard work of the great people and charities I have had the privilege of working with. The Honour is specifically for social cohesion , for building stronger communities, which takes a community to achieve.’

Shalni Arora OBE

Robert Peal MBE

Having graduated from Sidney with a Double First, Robert Peal gained a Masters in History from the University of Pennsylvania.

Returning to the UK, he spent a year working as an education research fellow at Civitas, a Westminster-based think tank, and a year working as a policy advisor to the then Schools Minister Nick Gibb. He is the author of Progressively Worse (2014), a history of teaching methods in British schools; Knowing History (2016), a series of textbooks for Collins; and Meet the Georgians (2021) a biographical history of the eighteenth century. He is currently working, with Nick Gibb, on a book about the school reform programme under the coalition and Conservative governments.

‘I was extremely surprised to be honoured in this way. I have worked at the West London Free School for the past ten years, and been co-headteacher for the past three, and hope to be there for many more years to come.’

'The West London Free School was founded in 2011, and at the time was one of only twelve Free Schools in the country. There are now over 600.'

Robert Peal MBE

Nick Poole OBE

Nick Poole is Chief Executive of Ukie, the UK trade association for the video games and interactive entertainment industry and an Industry Representative on the UK Government’s Literacy Taskforce.

Before taking up this position at Ukie in April this year, Nick spent nine years as Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP). CILIP is the leading UK organisation for knowledge and information professionals, representing a membership of 12,000 practitioners in 20 industry sectors.

From 2016-2021 he was Chair and Trustee of the Wikipedia Foundation. From 2005-2012, he was UK Representative to the European Commission, Culture & Technology.

‘I am delighted and honoured to have been awarded an OBE in the King’s Birthday Honours List 2024 in recognition of my work with the arts, museums and libraries. I believe passionately in the importance of universal access to literacy, culture and lifelong learning as the essential ingredients of stronger democracies and more inclusive societies – the values which were instilled in me during my time at Sidney.’

Nick Poole OBE