UK: Lord Dearing dies

Obituary: Ronald Earnest Dearing: 27 July 1930 - 19 February 2009

Ron Dearing, who has died at the age of 78, was among the great and good of the education world. In 1996 at the behest of John Major, the Conservative prime minister, he headed the national committee of inquiry into the future of higher education which resulted in the most radical review of universities since the Robbins report of 1963. The 1,700-page report included among its 93 recommendations one to introduce tuition fees for all students. This was enthusiastically taken up by the incoming Labour government. Against his advice, the new Education Secretary David Blunkett scrapped student grants and introduced means-tested fees.

Dearing's report sent shock waves through the sector but it set the agenda for the next decade. It was produced at a time when universities were in a state of chaos, said former Labour minister Roy Hattersley in The Guardian. Institutions were under-funded and over-stretched with rapidly increasing numbers of students.

Dearing envisaged that the money raised from tuition fees would be kept by universities as extra cash, but that hope was dashed early on in the reign of New Labour. Yet the government did plug some of the funding shortfall identified by the report and it has made higher education a priority.

His report did no more than touch on the internationalisation of universities, an omission that Dearing was conscious of, referring to it as 'the missing chapter'.

Writing in Times Higher Education in April 1998, he welcomed the formation of Universitas 21, a group of vice-chancellors from 17 research-intensive universities in eight countries with an agenda including staff and student exchanges, teaching and research scholarships and benchmarking of standards. Dearing was well aware of the need for British universities to be pro-active in the international student market and to keep ahead of competition.

The committee did not have time to do more than note this growing international dimension. It reported at a time when the almost universal concern was about the provision of resources rather than opportunities. The committee was therefore particularly concerned to look at ways in which overseas countries were seeking to address the issue of cost while maintaining standards, rather than to make a speculative assessment of international developments in higher education. But the committee was mindful of how swiftly the scene was developing.

The higher education review was not Dearing's first major report. In 1994 he worked on reforming the national school curriculum and introduced controversial assessment tests for students. Another report looked at ways of crossing the academic and vocational divide among 14 to 18-year-olds.

Lord Dearing (he was made a life peer in 1998) was a career civil servant, leaving his grammar school at 16 and working his way through the civil service examinations via an external degree at London University. He worked in the Treasury, the ministries of power and the department of trade and industry, and he was the first chair of the Post Office in the Thatcher government which awarded him a knighthood in 1984.

He was a 'safe pair of hands' for Labour and Conservative ministers alike, serving such diverse characters as Sir Keith Joseph and Tony Benn. He claimed that he was incapable of supporting any one political party.

Dearing was born in Hull where his father, a wharfinger's clerk, was killed in an air raid in 1942. His son was evacuated and sent to live with two elderly brothers in rural Yorkshire. They were cricket enthusiasts and their housekeeper was a Methodist. The young Dearing caught their enthusiasms and they remained with him for the rest of his life.

In a 1998 interview in the THES, he said: "Essentially, I have a very simple view about democracy: it is a pretty inefficient beast but thank God we have got it. I helped to make it more efficient. I helped to sell the democratic process."

Writing in The Guardian last week, Roy Hattersley, a former deputy leader of the Labour Party, said Dearing's most important attribute was his belief in redemption by hard work: "In that, as in so many other things, he was an essentially Victorian figure who, right to the end, lived modestly and spent his little spare time on odd jobs about the house."

Hattersley noted that later in his life, Dearing had discovered poetry and, speaking of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, said he refused to believe that it had been written on the poet's wedding night. It was not the nature of the poem which gave him doubts, but its quality: "Anything as good as that must have taken weeks of work..." Nothing could more adequately have revealed the true Dearing character, Hattersley said.

Lord Dearing is survived by his wife, Margaret, and two daughters.

diane.spencer@uw-news.com