Malcolm Skilbeck obituary

My father, Malcolm Skilbeck, who has died aged 89, had a distinguished international career in education. Passionate about the transformative potential of learning, he was disappointed in the reductive testing regimes that have overtaken schooling, but remained hopeful for the possibility of progressive change.

He was an early, intuitive environmentalist, and supported himself as a student at the University of Sydney by working in a plant nursery. He walked these parallel and connected tracks throughout his life, bringing them together in his final publication, written over his last decade, Loving and Studying Nature: Celebrating the Earth Through History, Culture and Education (2021).

Malcolm was born in Northam, Western Australia, to Harry, a mining engineer, and Elsie (nee Douglas), a dressmaker. After early schooling in Broken Hill, Adelaide and Sydney, he gained his first degree, in philosophy and education, at the University of Sydney. He married Elizabeth Robbins in 1955 and the couple travelled to the UK, where Malcolm received his PhD from the University of London.

His first higher education post was as a sessional lecturer for the University of Maryland (teaching at US air force bases in England). Appointments followed – with positions ranging from tutor to professor to vice-chancellor – at the University of Bristol, New University of Ulster, the University of London’s Institute of Education and Deakin University in Victoria, Australia.

He was foundation director of Australia’s Curriculum Development Centre (1975-81), research director at the Schools Council for Curriculum and Examinations of England and Wales (1981-83) and deputy director for education at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (1991-97). He chaired the campaign to keep Britain in Unesco (1985). In 2014 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for his work in education.

His love of the natural world, gardening, music, art and architecture, good food, literature and poetry brought him joy throughout his life. Long walks, rainy camps, muddy dogs and car journeys full of song – English folk songs were a favourite – were family holiday staples, and he had a prodigious memory for poetry and was a great storyteller. Dinners in his company were raucous affairs.

He and Elizabeth separated in 1978; she died in 2008. In 1984 he married Helen Connell, and after his retirement from the OECD in 1999 they returned to their home on the Bellarine Peninsula, Victoria. He dedicated himself to his garden, grew a parkland around their weatherboard home, and they spent years living on homegrown produce and drinking their own Lark Edge wine. I will remember him always, sitting on the veranda, looking through the eucalypts, over the grapevines to the blue bay below, watching the boats and listening to the birds.

He is survived by Helen and their daughter, Brigit, and four children, Ruth, Clare, Paul and me, from his first marriage, and by his grandchildren, James, Ella, Conor and Lexie, and great-grandchildren, Finnegan and Nora. His grandson Max predeceased him.