My colleague and friend Francesca Inskipp, also known as Cesca, who has died aged 100, lived a life lit by the qualities of resilience, curiosity, determination and warmth, and by a sense of fun, which enabled her to make an outstanding contribution to counselling and supervision in the UK.
In the 1960s, she and her husband, John, oversaw a residential centre in Essex, running courses for sixth formers and youth workers. Brooklands buzzed with energy and an excitement for learning, and the years there stimulated Francesca’s desire for new horizons. In 1971, she embarked on a year’s full-time training as a counsellor at Keele University.
After briefly training youth workers in Essex, she joined the Centre for Studies in Counselling, set up by Hans Hoxter, at the North East London Polytechnic (now the University of East London), where she remained until her retirement in the 1980s. With me and other colleagues there, she created courses in counselling for teachers, careers officers and other helping professions, while contributing to many formative developments in accreditation and training for the British Association for Counselling.
Francesca was brilliant at “catching” ideas from all sorts of sources, and at collaborating with others to hone and apply them to new contexts. She took her work seriously but was also good at having fun - her party performances of the Charleston always impressed our students.
She was born in Hastings, East Sussex, to a single mother, Helen Dupree. The family’s financial needs meant that Francesca left school at 15 and later worked as a secretary in wartime London. The delights and challenges of her seaside childhood stayed with her always.
A friend from her youth, John Inskipp, returned to Hastings after the second world war, having spent four years as a prisoner of war in Crete. They married in 1947 and brought up three sons, while both training to be teachers. Teaching biology and her early involvement with the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme proved to be the perfect fusion of Francesca’s lifelong fascination for both the natural world and people.
After her retirement from NELP in the early 1980s, she and John returned to East Sussex, to a seaside flat in St Leonards-on-Sea. Francesca swam regularly, worked as a counsellor and supervisor, and, with another counselling trainer, Brigid Proctor, hugely influenced developments in supervision and the training of supervisors. She was instrumental, too, in the setting up of counselling services in Hastings.
She was consistently a learner and explorer. In her 70s she completed a three-year training in psychosynthesis, an approach to counselling which emphasises values, purpose and meaning in life; and she travelled far and wide with John in their beloved VW camper van.
After his death in 2007, Francesca still travelled with friends, but was always glad to return to her beloved sea, her much-loved books, the Guardian, her cat, family and the many friends, of all ages and types, who were central to her life.
She is survived by her three sons, Richard, Tim and Mark, four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
