Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken Robinson obituary The Guardian
Educationist who argued that children’s creativity is stifled by school systems that prioritise academic achievement

Ken Robinson in London in 2005. In California the following year he said: ‘Our education system has mined our minds in the way we strip-mined the earth for a particular commodity.’ Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

The educationist Sir Ken Robinson, proponent of the encouragement of creativity among children, who has died aged 70 of cancer, was largely ignored by politicians of both main parties as he insisted that the policy of successive UK governments, that literacy and numeracy should predominate, was a false priority. As he told interviewers: “That’s like saying let’s make the cake and if it’s all right we’ll put the eggs in.”

Reputedly one lesson can change the course of a pupil’s career – Robinson became an exemplar of the much rarer idea that one speech can change a teacher’s whole trajectory. It was an off-the-cuff, 19-minute address without notes entitled Do Schools Kill Creativity? at a TED (technology, entertainment and design) educational conference in California in 2006 that propelled him to something approaching worldwide celebrity within and beyond education.

His wry and witty extempore style, honed in Liverpool, was characteristically engaging. Subsequently posted on YouTube, the talk has reputedly been viewed by 380 million people in 160 countries and has influenced schools around the world.

In that speech, and at other less noticed conferences and less well attended seminars over many years, Robinson argued that children do not grow into artistic creativity but are educated out of it by school systems that prioritise academic achievement and conformity instead of liberating imagination and initiative.

He told the audience in 2006: “I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new concept of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way we strip-mined the earth for a particular commodity. We have to rethink the fundamental principles in which we are educating our children.”

Understandably, this was much more enticing to the education profession than it was to government ministers, but it was based not on a single speech but Robinson’s whole career in academic education, which culminated in a professorship at Warwick University (1989-2001), before he became a senior adviser to the J Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles.

If the argument was that individual creativity was stifled by the system, it was less easy to discern how that might be recreated within a state education with its emphasis on attainment targets and examination results. The Blair government at least invited him to chair an inquiry in 1997, which produced a report, All Our Futures, but then largely ignored it; while Michael Gove as education secretary and his special adviser Dominic Cummings chose snide derision to dismiss the establishment “blob” of which they felt he was clearly a part. Robinson himself said in an interview with the Independent in 2018: “If I didn’t piss somebody off I’d probably be doing something wrong, but I don’t set out to do it.”

He told Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs in 2013 that schools should have discretion to develop creativity: “Don’t treat children as the same or over-programme them, they find their talents by trying things out.”

But Robinson admitted on the programme that he had benefited from an academic education system and insisted he was not opposed to a national curriculum, but just wanted one with different priorities and parity of esteem between core subjects and artistic ones such as dance.

The fifth of seven children of Ethel (nee Allen) and James Robinson, he was born in an impoverished household in Liverpool, close to Everton’s Goodison Park football ground. His father worked at various jobs, including running a pub and as a docker, and was left paraplegic after his back was broken in a dockside accident when Ken was nine. He himself spent eight months in hospital after being diagnosed with polio at the age of four, thereafter walking with a limp, ending any chance of playing for the local club, though his brother Neil did so.

Instead, Robinson’s parents encouraged him academically. He was initially educated at a special school for children with disabilities but passed the 11-plus and attended Liverpool Collegiate school, proceeding to study for a Bachelor of Education degree at Bretton Hall College, west Yorkshire, founded by the educationist Alec Clegg, which specialised in the arts. It had a formative effect on his career and he went on to complete a doctorate in drama and theatre in education at London University.

His subsequent career focused on the arts in education, working on a schools’ council project which became his first book, Learning Through Drama (1977), and running courses for teachers. In the early 1980s he was lead researcher and author of the Arts in Schools project for the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and after that became the director of the Arts in Schools project, which in turn helped to shape the national curriculum after the 1988 Baker Act.

He founded and chaired Artswork, the national youth arts development agency and founded and co-edited Arts Express magazine, before joining the staff at Warwick. The invitation to join the Getty Trust in California came in early January 2001: “It was cold and wet – what would you do? We went as fast as we could.”

Robinson was the author of several more books, including Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative (2001), Finding Your Element (2014) and Creative Schools (2015). He was knighted in 2003.

Robinson’s success at the TED conference, where he spoke three times over a number of years, propelled him into a different financial and celebrity league. His friend and agent Brendan Barns said: “What really set Ken apart from other speakers and educationists was his ability instantly to create rapport with his audiences. He made everyone feel he was talking to them personally.”

Robinson met Marie-Therese Watts, known as Terry, while giving a course in Liverpool in 1977. They married in 1982 and had two children, James and Kate. The couple returned to live in London last year to be near Kate and her baby daughter, Adeline.

Terry and their children survive him.

Kenneth Robinson, educationist, born 4 March 1950; died 21 August 2020

Dr. Alyn Davies

Alyn Davies obituary

Eric Bourne and Barbara Hilton

The Guardian, Tuesday 17 January, 2012

Our former colleague Alyn Davies, who has died aged 76, was the Inner London Education Authority’s last chief inspector for further and higher education. Alyn’s move to Ilea in 1980 saw the authority at the pinnacle of its achievements. With intellect, humanity and modesty, he managed our vibrant (and at times Pickwickian) inspectorate, accommodating our strengths and quirks, and always being there to support us.

His breadth of knowledge and experience enabled him to represent the huge range of interests within his responsibility, including polytechnics, further education and adult and continuing education. With college principals he was resolute and kind and commanded their full respect. Alyn, with cheerfulness and courage, contributed to the awesome task of changing, downsizing and disassembling Ilea, which was abolished in 1990.

The son of the irreverent Welsh Labour MP SO Davies, Alyn was born in Merthyr Tydfil. He was educated there at Cyfarthfa Castle grammar school and at Nottingham University, where he studied chemistry and, after some years in teaching, gained his PhD.

In 1966 he became an inspector of schools in the West Riding of Yorkshire, upholding Sir Alec Clegg’s vision of a child-centred, art-inspired education. Two years later, he was appointed principal of Bretton Hall College of Education, a Clegg creation specialising in art, fashion, textiles, music and drama, with 700 students and 70 teaching staff, and offering BA courses validated by Leeds University. In 1977 Alyn supported the creation of a sculpture park in the grounds of Bretton Hall; the park, with its works by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, became world famous.

Those of us who had the privilege of working with and for him will remember Alyn with deep respect and profound affection. He was at heart a kind man who was immensely proud of his south Wales roots and who cherished his family.

He is survived by his wife, Margaret, whom he married in 1958, and three daughters and four grandchildren, in whom Alyn instilled an abiding sense of discovery about the world.

Anne Collins

The Guardian

Tuesday 4 August 2009

Anne Collins

Powerful contralto renowned for her performances in operatic character roles

Anne Collins, who has died of cancer aged 65, was the possessor of a true contralto voice, which she used to great effect in an opera career that spanned nearly 40 years. Born in Durham, she began as a cellist, later moving on to voice at the Royal College of Music. It was there that she was first noticed, in a student performance in 1969 of William Walton's one-act opera, The Bear. Her interpretation of The Widow was deemed "powerful" and her voice "intelligently used, comically inflected".

Joining Sadler's Wells Opera, in its second season at the London Coliseum, Collins made her debut in 1970 as the governess in Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, followed by the Third Lady in Mozart's The Magic Flute. The part that showed her great promise later that year was Antonia's mother in Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann. In Colin Graham's production, designed by David Collis, she emerged as a ghost, floating in mid-air (actually on a fork-lift) and dominating the great trio.

The following year, she began to use her comic gifts in the first of her Gilbert and Sullivan roles, as the Fairy Queen in Iolanthe, opposite the Private Willis of Robert Lloyd. Her formidable delivery of the lines "When your houses next assemble/You may tremble" had the true Savoy style. By way of complete contrast, she was a touching Mamma Lucia, portrayed with a club foot, in Cavalleria Rusticana. When the company performed Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea for the first time, with Janet Baker in the title role, Collins was the witty Arnalta.

There were many other character roles with the company, including Ragonde in Rossini's Count Ory, Inez in Il Trovatore, Madame Akhrosimova in the first UK production of Prokofiev's War and Peace, Ulrica in Verdi's The Masked Ball and a Suzuki in Madama Butterfly, "landing some well-aimed kicks at Goro, one might have been watching the World Cup" as Rodney Milnes wrote in Opera magazine.

The 1970s, though, are remembered above all, once the company had been rechristened English National Opera, for the cycles of Wagner's Ring conducted by Reginald Goodall. Collins took part in the very first cycle in 1973, singing in all four parts, as Erda in The Rhinegold and Siegfried, Rossweisse in The Valkyrie, and the Second Norn in The Twilight of the Gods. All these are preserved in the recordings made live at the Coliseum.

Collins's verve was demonstrated when she took on the role of Lady Jane in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, playing the cello onstage, and dancing with the ebullient Bunthorne of Derek Hammond-Stroud. For several seasons they delighted audiences, amused by the contrast – sometimes in the same month – of seeing Hammond-Stroud as Alberich, and Collins as Erda in the Ring, and then having them re-emerge in Patience. The G&S production travelled to Vienna, and later to the US, on ENO's guest tours.

Collins also sang in the British premiere of Henze's The Bassarids, 1974, in Shostakovich's The Nose, 1979, and, another memorable comic turn, as The Countess in Nino Rota's The Italian Straw Hat, the latter with the New Opera Company in 1980. When Welsh National Opera first performed Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage in 1977, Collins was Sosostris, in which she enjoyed a particular success when the company took the opera to Lisbon in 1979. Collins later sang Erda with WNO in Göran Järvefelt's production of The Ring. With the Handel Opera Society, she sang Dejanira in Hercules and Onoria in Ezio. In 1975 and 1980 she was the vocal soloist at the Last Night of the Proms.

At Covent Garden, Collins sang a number of roles, including Anna in Berlioz's The Trojans (1977), the Mother in Ravel's L'Enfant et les Sortilèges (1983) in the John Dexter-David Hockney staging, Mary in Wagner's The Flying Dutchman (1986), the Mother Superior in Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel (1992) and, most recently, Auntie in Britten's Peter Grimes (2004). This was a part that she sang in several productions in Europe, in Geneva, Brussels and Hamburg. For Scottish Opera, Collins created the role of the Angel of Death in James MacMillan's Inés de Castro (1996). In later years she several times returned to ENO as Katisha in Jonathan Miller's production of The Mikado, seeming to bring some sense to all the antics. Her singing and acting were all the more funny, as she was obviously taking it all very seriously.

The contralto voice is a rarity. Collins could use it to its best degree and achieve success equally in drama and comedy, in parts great and small. As well as the Goodall Ring, her other recordings include Peter Grimes, Albert Herring, Vaughan-Williams's The Poisoned Kiss, and several G&S parts, on CD and video.

Anne Collins, contralto, born 29 August 1943; died 15 July 2009

Seonaid Robertson

The Guardian – Monday, 18th February, 2008

Seonaid Robertson

Education lecturer who dedicated her life to the creative arts

As a senior lecturer in art education in Yorkshire and in London, Seonaid Robertson, who has died aged 96, influenced hundreds of trainee teachers from the late 1940s until her retirement in the early 1970s. Teaching crafts, she told them, was crucial to the development of the imagination and the individual creativity of children.

Through her seminal works for postwar educators, Creative Crafts in Education (1952) and Rosegarden and Labyrinth (1963), she reached many more teachers worldwide. The latter book explored her insights into the symbols and archetypes in the work of children when creating art – especially pottery – and links between children’s art and traditional ritualistic art.

Today the importance of the creative artistic experience in developing the whole child is accepted. Not so when Seonaid became a teacher just before and during the war, in Suffolk and Keighley, Yorkshire. That was a time when persuasion was needed to place art and craft on the curriculum, when drawing was seen simply as a skill to be developed and “art” the province of a few. Following her mentor, Herbert Read, she believed that through art education the child’s imagination can be fostered and the creativity within all children unleashed.

Seonaid was born in Perth, the daughter of a market auctioneer, and educated at the co-educational Perth academy. Her family was of farming stock and her Scottish identity very strong. As a 10-year-old she keenly felt her mother’s death but spent happy holidays with her cousins on her aunt’s farm, which deeply influenced her. She was profoundly sensitive to the earth, and mountains and all that grew there. Fascinated by the use of plants in dyes she published Dyes from Natural Plants (1973). Another strong childhood influence was prehistory – standing stones and stone circles – and, later, remains of Pictish and Celtic civilisations.

After a year at Edinburgh University studying literature and history, she specialised for three years in pottery and fabrics at Edinburgh College of Art. After training at Moray House College of Education, she taught in primary schools in Suffolk and Keighley.

She spent 1944 reading psychology at London University consolidating her ideas and beginning Creative Crafts in Education. While writing it, Seonaid worked as an art adviser for the West Riding of Yorkshire, an education authority headed by the farsighted Alex Clegg. She then became a founder member and art education senior lecturer at Bretton Hall College, west Yorkshire (1949-55). It was one of the happiest, most fulfilling periods of her life – as she passed on her ideas in a college dedicated to the arts, drama and music – while living in a beautiful environment. She was passionate about nature’s importance in developing young lives. From 1955 to 1957 she was a senior fellow at Leeds University which enabled her to write Rosegarden and Labyrinth.

Her final job was as lecturer in education at London University’s Goldsmiths College from the late 1950s to 1971. Seonaid was a founder member of the International Society for Education Through Art and also of the World Craft Council, and she lectured in many countries. One of her most memorable times was the five months she spent in Brazil in the 1950s, at the invitation of its arts ministry.

Post-retirement, she continued to work abroad, particularly in the US, and was much appreciated, using natural resources for pottery, building kilns and using natural dyes, studying and learning from traditional Native American arts. She spent about six months of every year in the US, making some of her closest friends, living in Florida through the winter and in Selsey, West Sussex, in the summer. One of her greatest delights was living near the sea, swimming and watching its rhythms.

Always a step ahead, she stressed the importance of food untainted by additives and chemical fertilisers and of the potential benefits of herbal medicine. For her the most important thing was to keep in touch with the natural world, its beauty and spirituality.

Seonaid never married and had no children, but children were at the heart of her life. At ease with them, she always took them seriously. She sponsored more than a dozen children from many different countries and the contact she had with them gave her immense happiness and satisfaction. Her generosity to many other people was enormous, and largely unknown, except to those whom she helped.

Seonaid Robertson, educationist and writer, born January 27 1912; died January 18 2008