Maureen Hattey obituary

My mother, Maureen Hattey, who has died aged 78, was an advocate and progressive educator for special needs children whose work brought the school into the community and the community into the school.

Having initially worked in mainstream education as a primary school teacher, Maureen joined the child development centre at Charing Cross hospital in 1979. Working with the paediatrician Hugh Jolly, she gained first-hand experience of a new way of supporting children with disabilities. Jolly’s approach centred on listening to and working with children and their parents to provide tailored treatment and care. It was revolutionary at the time.

Maureen applied this ethos to teaching at the Ridgeway community school in Farnham, Surrey, a school catering for pupils aged two to 19 with severe and profound multiple learning difficulties. She became a senior teacher specialising in the creative and performing arts in 1989, and head in 1997. There, she dedicated herself to ensuring her students had the breadth of opportunity their peers in mainstream education received. The creative and performing arts were at the heart of many of Maureen’s initiatives to integrate the school and the community, and saw students putting on performances with mainstream schools during the “creative arts week” she established.

At this time, the new Labour government was pursuing a vision of collaboration between mainstream and special schools, and Maureen had inherited some serious challenges, which an Ofsted inspection highlighted. With the school in special measures, Maureen led a transformation programme, becoming a guinea pig for the government’s new approach to special needs education. Along with the construction of better facilities, she pioneered collaborations between the Ridgeway and other educational institutions in the local area; the school’s nursery was relocated to a mainstream setting and its older students were integrated into the local sixth form. The school emerged from special measures within just 18 months.

Maureen was born in Oxford to Sybil (nee Benbow) and Norman Langford, who both worked in the City of London in accountancy and conveyancing. She attended Barnet secondary modern in north-west London and Hatfield Technical College (now the University of Hertfordshire), before studying teacher training at Southlands College in Wimbledon and taking a BA (1978) and a master’s (1993) in education at the Open University.

She retired from Ridgeway in 2005, and spent her time travelling with her partner Will Warner, a builder, whom she had known for many years, until his death in 2015.

Maureen is survived by her children, Nicola, Ross and me, from her 1968 marriage to Gus Hattey, which ended in divorce in 1983, and her grandchildren, Ella, Louis, Jools, Sophia and Noel.