My friend Tony Somerset, who has died aged 94, was an educationist dedicated to working with policymakers and teachers in Africa and Asia to come up with education systems that would better serve children of all backgrounds.
He helped to introduce a reform programme for Kenya’s certificate of primary education that leaned towards comprehension, application and analysis rather than straight memory and recall testing.
In the Philippines he worked with the government on a project to improve teacher distribution, developing a disparity index that revealed areas where pupil/teacher ratios were high (say, 50 pupils per teacher, as opposed to 30) and then allocating new teaching roles to them. The system is still in use.
Tony was born in Oxford, near Christchurch, New Zealand, to Gwen (nee Alley) and her husband, Crawford. He spent most of his childhood in Feilding in the North Island, where his teacher parents ran a community education centre. He went to Feilding high school, then did a degree in psychology at Victoria University, taking on a job there after graduation as a research assistant in 1954.
Seeking new experiences, he moved to the UK in 1957 with Betty Odell, a lecturer whom he had met at university; they married in 1959.
Working initially as a researcher at Warneford hospital, in Headington, carrying out psychological studies of patients, he and Betty then spent three years from 1963 to 1966 in Uganda. There he took up a post as a research fellow at the East African Institute for Social Research at Makerere University College in Kampala.
The next 15 years were spent in Kenya, first as a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at Nairobi University and then as head of research at the Kenya National Examination Council.
From 1981 onwards Tony was an independent consultant based in the UK, working in particular with the World Bank on addressing educational issues in Indonesia and the Philippines, from teacher training and science education to assessment and examinations.
He also taught international education at the Institute of Education, London and at the University of Sussex, where I met him as a postgraduate student. In both places his wit, intelligence, erudition and breadth of experience made him a popular figure.
Betty died of cancer in 1969, and thereafter Tony was a single parent to their three children, Anthony, Eleanor and Richard, who survive him, along with his grandchildren, Hugh, Tim, Sam, and Mimi.
