Star-Studded Celebration for Queen’s Award Winners Scanning Pens
UK EdTech company Scanning Pens was presented with a Queen’s Award for Business by Mrs. Anna Turner JP, the Lord-Lieutenant of Shropshire at a dedicated ceremony held at Hoar Cross Hall earlier this month.
The accolade celebrates Scanning Pens’ outstanding success in the field of international trade, and was awarded to CEO Jack S. Churchill and COO Toby Sutton in the presence of their families and co-workers, as well as the High Sheriff of Shropshire, representatives from the Department for International Trade, and members of the local government.
Created in 2003, Scanning Pens is a dedicated EdTech company supplying text-to-speech devices to people with dyslexia, as well as raising awareness of dyslexia worldwide and supporting people whose daily lives are impacted by literacy differences. Scanning Pens devices represent a huge quality-of-life change for neurodiverse people, and work by allowing users to scan through and listen to texts via an audio feedback system. Removing the need for in-person readers and modified texts, they make reading an independent act, and help people who struggle with reading able to engage with texts in the same way that a neurotypical person might.
CEO Jack S. Churchill said, “We are over the moon to have received the Queen’s Awards for Enterprise. As a team we’re over the moon to have our work recognised in this way. Our company came together last week for the first time in 2 years to receive the award and celebrate. This award encourages us to redouble our efforts to support more people to overcome their struggles with weak literacy.”
As a multinational business, Scanning Pens has dedicated the past eighteen months to exploring what new opportunities they can offer to people with dyslexia and literacy differences during the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as continuing to support the markets that rely on their award-winning text-to-speech technology. The last three years has seen a significant increase in the company’s overseas markets growing from one UK office and 10 UK staff, to two UK offices, and one office each in USA, Australia, Canada, and India with more than 80 staff around the world.
The event at Hoar Cross Hall was attended by a number of accessibility and EdTech industry champions, with representatives from Landau, Phonic Books, The Shannon Trust, Novus, Nasen and the Shropshire Dyslexia Association. After a series of short addresses by business management and the Lord-Lieutenant of Shropshire, the company toasted their business successes with a long-awaited celebration in the luxurious surroundings of the Hoar Cross Hall Spa Hotel.