Sir Peter Newsam obituary

Peter Newsam, who has died aged 95, first made his mark in education as a champion of the fledgling comprehensive school system, which aimed to replace grammar, secondary modern and technical schools in England and Wales. This came in the 1970s, while he was at the helm of the Inner London Education Authority (Ilea).

The London county council’s London School Plan of 1947 had committed to reorganising schools along the comprehensive model, and this was reiterated in 1970 when Labour won back Ilea from the Conservatives, with an aim for all schools to be comprehensive by 1980. Newsam was Ilea’s education officer – effectively chief education officer – from 1977 to 1982, and his influence and guiding hand were critical in persuading its education committee to end selection in schools smaller than the ideal intake of 240 pupils.

The capital had more than 200 secondary schools, most of which were delighted to go comprehensive. Its 45 grammar schools proved a tougher nut to crack, but Newsam successfully persuaded 39 to switch during his period in charge.

Under Newsam, Ilea became the first authority in the UK to introduce tailored policies to improve provision for minority ethnic pupils, including appointing a racially diverse team of inspectors and launching a programme to raise awareness of the effect of race, sex and class on pupils’ outcomes.

Another innovation was the launch of a groundbreaking educational television service that ran throughout the 70s, with programmes transmitted on a closed network from studios in Battersea to schools across the authority.

Newsam’s charm meant he was as comfortable and effective briefing ministers, for example, as he was telling parents that their grammar school was likely to close, while assiduously attending numerous meetings with the latter. All-night lock-ins by anxious parents were common, and he mused to colleagues that “when you see the blankets and coffee flasks you know you are in trouble”.

His own education had come at private establishments – the Dragon prep school in Oxford and then as a boarder at Clifton college in Bristol. Born in Gloucester, he was the youngest of four sons of immigrant parents – Delphine Lelievre, from France, and William Newsam, who had won the only annual scholarship in Barbados to Oxford University, eventually becoming a circuit judge in India – which later influenced his thinking on multicultural issues.

He lived in India for most of the first five years of his life and also won a scholarship to Oxford, studying philosophy, politics and economics at Queen’s College. After graduating, in 1952 he entered the civil service at the Board of Trade, but left after three years to train to be a teacher.

Following a spell teaching in Oxford, Newsam switched to local education authority services, serving in what was then the North Riding education authority in Yorkshire from 1963 to 1966. He was then assistant director in Cumberland and in 1970 became deputy to the long-serving chief education officer Sir Alec Clegg – an inspirational mentor – in the West Riding of Yorkshire. In 1972 he moved to London to become deputy, until 1977, then education officer of Ilea until 1982.

Unusually, Newsam was prepared to intervene personally if he felt a child was at risk from the education system. In his two-part memoir The Autobiography of an Education (2014), he recounts how, when working in North Yorkshire, he re-marked a twin’s 11+ paper that was one short of the pass mark so that the boy would not be separated from his twin brother.

He stepped down from the ill-fated Ilea – it was finally closed down in 1990 by the Conservatives – in August 1982, reflecting that “10 years’ service there was equivalent to working 20 elsewhere”. He continued his interest in bolstering equal opportunities across racial and ethnic groups, and at the invitation of the Conservative home secretary, Willie Whitelaw, became chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (1982-87). He was briefly secretary of the Association of County Councils (1987-89) and then became director of the Institute of Education (now part of UCL, 1989-94).

There he oversaw the creation of an extension to the “ziggurat” building in Bloomsbury designed by Denys Lasdun, which now houses the extensive Newsam Library.

Newsam also served as deputy vice-chancellor of the University of London from 1992 to 1994. Following Tony Blair’s general election victory in 1997, he was appointed by the new education secretary David Blunkett as the first chief adjudicator of school organisation and admissions in 1999 – ruling on disputes – and became a member of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain.

His political instincts were by nature left-leaning. As the Blair government’s ambitious new policies on “education, education, education” began to be rolled out, he voiced his fierce opposition to the new academies and free schools (frequently in letters to newspapers, including the Guardian) because the model gave the education secretary total control.

He was one of the few people to warn that in this way the previously local authority-led education service was being nationalised by stealth. In 2013 he went even further, claiming that the office of secretary of state for education – by now held by Michael Gove in the Conservative government – had become “totalitarian”.

His peers recall a quintessentially “English gentleman” – he was knighted in 1987 – and a smart, dapper figure who could quote Shakespeare at ease and at length. Interested in the arts and culture, he took his work seriously but was also renowned for his good sense of humour. He enjoyed golf and cricket, and in later years, near Pickering, North Yorkshire, he enjoyed walking his dogs.

He was married three times: first, in 1953, to Elizabeth Greg, with whom he had a daughter and four sons; then in 1988 to Susan Addinell, with whom he had a further daughter; both marriages ended in divorce. In 2017 he married Sarah King, who survives him, along with his children, Anita, Nicholas, Anthony, Paul, Robert and Georgia, seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild.