My mother, Sylvia Downs, who has died aged 89, always felt she had missed out on her education because she had attended many different schools, and one of them, where her father was headteacher, was an all boys establishment. The family moved around for his different teaching jobs. But she spent the rest of her life developing and implementing radical ideas about learning and training, working as an occupational psychologist, changing methods, attitudes and opportunities from the shop floor to senior management.
She was born in Chiswick, London, daughter of Alfred Wisdom and his wife, Hannah (nee Jeffries), known as Pat. During the second world war she was a radio mechanic in the Wrens (Women’s Royal Naval Service). Afterwards, she studied psychology at University College London and her first job was as a research assistant at the Child Study Centre in London.
She married Alan Downs in 1952 and had three children, then returned to work, spending the next two decades involved in research at the Industrial Training Research Unit at Cambridge. Working with fork-lift truck drivers, shipbuilders, post office workers, train drivers and sewing machinists, she developed trainability testing, where selection is based on tests that assess individuals’ training potential for a specific job. By the early 1980s she was invited by the Manpower Services Commission to set up the Occupational Research Unit at University of Wales, Cardiff. Here, with Pat Perry, she further developed her work on self-learning, retraining and the role of trainers, covering all age groups.
Her brief period as a partner in private consultancy made her realise the economic value of her work, possibly for the first time. She then set up her own consultancy, with my father running her office from their Weybridge home. She advised some of the industrial giants of the time: ICI, Shell, SmithKline Beecham and Glaxo.
It was through ICI that she started working in South Africa with Sue von Hirschfeld and her team on projects designed to manage change in industry at the end of apartheid, and also on voter education for the first multiracial national election of 1994. Her theories on training for learning and making learning happen proliferated through this team. Alongside this, she was visiting professor at Queen’s University Belfast, City University Business School and at the Open College of New Zealand. This was one of her happiest periods of work.
Sylvia relished problem solving, sharing her ideas and explaining things simply; she was a creative thinker, cheerful, widely travelled and politically aware. In the 1990s, she and Alan moved to Exeter, but she never really retired.
Alan predeceased her. She is survived by my siblings, Simon and Sarah, and me, eight grandchildren and six great grandchildren.
