Geoffrey Marshall obituary

My father, Geoffrey Marshall, who has died aged 92, was headteacher of three primary schools over a period of 35 years. Each school was built around the fierce conviction that education should be an unconditional service to children and everything that happened in the classroom should proceed from the individuality and different needs of each child.

Geoffrey was born near the village of Borstal outside Rochester in Kent, the youngest of three children. His father, Charles, was a school attendance officer and amateur violinist, and his mother, Mary (nee Latham), owned a children’s clothes shop in Sidcup. Geoffrey went to Bromley grammar school and then did national service with the RAF from 1946.

A degree in law from Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge was followed by 12 years of “stand-and-deliver” teaching, as he called it, following the didactic traditions of the day at Lady Boswell’s in Sevenoaks and Kevington primary school in Orpington, where he met Jill Campbell, a fellow teacher, whom he married in 1957; they went on to have me and my brother, John.

But it was the course entitled the Education of Children in the Junior School at the Institute of Education, University of London, with the great educationist Christian Schiller in 1962 that transformed my father from a traditionalist – who was as happy opening the batting for Bickley Park cricket club as he was standing in front a class of children – to someone who for the remainder of his life would live and breathe education.

Geoffrey was appointed headteacher of Shoreham village school in Kent in 1963, followed five years later by the headship of Northcourt, a school on a deprived housing estate in Gravesend. He remained at his last school, Sherwood Park junior school in Tunbridge Wells, for 15 years, retiring in 1989.

The teaching at these schools was founded on the understanding that children learn by reflecting on first-hand experiences and by making choices about how to respond. A visitor to a classroom would have noticed not only the richness of the experiences available, but how the children, with their teacher alongside, were confidently exploiting these learning opportunities in a subdued hum of purposeful activity.

During his long retirement, Geoffrey wrote a number of published articles that revealed his anger at what he saw as the narrowness of successive governments’ policies, which had turned education, he argued, into a government-run training programme where learning was streamlined, standardised, tested and compared, in the service of the economy.

“If children are encouraged to choose,” he wrote, “they will flourish in all the fields of enquiry and once more astonish the world. Those who legislated against this type of learning did so essentially because they could not bear to think that they might lose control of a vigorous, unpredictable, irreverent movement whose work could not be measured and was only concerned with the child.”

Jill died in 2019, and John also predeceased him. Geoffrey is survived by me and his three grandsons, William, James and Richard.