A STOURPORT school’s workshop technician has been honoured with an accolade in the Worcestershire Education Awards.

Stourport High School and Sixth Form College’s Dennis Simpson was given the Unsung Hero award at the Worcestershire Education Awards – organised by our sister paper, the Worcester News.

Mr Simpson started work at the school in 1988 and was praised for dedicating so many years to helping the pupils.

The workshop and school technician has served the school for 28 years and is said to have saved taxpayers thousands by giving so much of his own free time.

Throughout the 1980s and 90s he helped boys who were struggling by training them in woodwork, metalwork and prefabrication.

Thanks to his input, some of the youngsters who may have been excluded were able to carry on at school.

One who said Mr Simpson helped him described how he left school with few qualifications but was able to set up his own successful business thanks to the guidance and support he received from Mr Simpson.

At the event, Mr Simpson said: “I’m overjoyed.

“I can’t believe it.

“The teachers found, with the challenging students, they could send them to me and I could get some progress out of them and so for many years I was doing that.”

Mr Simpson was also responsible for discovering the Stourport National Boys School memorial board, which commemorated 80 students and one teacher who fell in the Great War.

Mr Simpson, who served in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, enlisted the help of the boys doing his special projects and they restored it to its former glory.

He petitioned the school governors for it to be hung in the school hall, where it forms the centrepiece of the school’s Service of Remembrance.

This was the start of a series of history projects in which Mr Simpson has championed restoring memorials and has acted as a guardian of the school’s history.

With classic modesty, Mr Simpson said: “I found the school memorial board in the back of the old boiler house.

“We restored it.

“Over the years we have restored quite a few.”

His nomination said: “He is the archetypal gentleman who is uncomfortable with public accolades.

“He is the embodiment of a generation who believe that they have a duty to serve others and that they are ‘just doing their job’.”