Rennie Fritchie, Baroness Fritchie

Irene Tordoff Fritchie, Baroness Fritchie, DBE (known as Rennie Fritchie) was born in Fife, Scotland, on April 29, 1942.

Educated at Ribston Hall Grammar School for Girls in Gloucester, she has had a long career specialising in training and development. Now described as a 'portfolio' worker, Lady Fritchie holds various positions in addition to that of [http://www.ocpa.gov.uk/index.asp United Kingdom Commissioner for Public Appointments] , including President of the Pennell Initiative for Women’s Health in Later Life.

In the 1970s, she was one of the first full-time women’s training advisers and pioneered the training of staff in the then new Equal Opportunities Commission. Using a German Marshall Fellowship awarded in 1985, she drew lessons from the United States of America for the United Kingdom for programmes to improve the status of women. She has published extensively on these topics and contributes regularly on them to programmes on television and radio.

Becoming Commissioner for Public Appointments in 1999, renewed in 2002 and extended in 2005, neither diminished Baroness Fritchie’s professional life nor deflected her from helping others. She holds an honorary Professorship in Creative Leadership at York University and is Pro-Chancellor at Southampton University, a Civil Service Commissioner and Vice-Chair of the Stroud and Swindon Building Society.

Active in a number of charities, Rennie Fritchie has been awarded honorary degrees by a number of academic institutions.

Rennie Fritchie became a dame in 1996. In 2005 she was made a life peer as Baroness Fritchie, of Gloucester in the County of Gloucestershire, and she sits as a crossbencher in the House of Lords.