Fred Jarvis obituary

The eminent trade unionist Fred Jarvis, who has died aged 95, was distinguished by his lifelong passion and commitment to education. A president of the National Union of Students in the 1950s, he was the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers from 1975 until 1989, when it was the biggest teacher union in Europe. He was a member of the TUC general council from 1974 until 1989 and its president in 1986-87.

It was his fate, having had the opinion formers and a large public on his side during the 60s, to have reached the top of the NUT during the Margaret Thatcher years, and to find that he had enemies. The years 1985 and 1986 were marked by highly unpopular teachers’ strikes in London. Within three years, with Jarvis still at the helm, the NUT had lost two of its main privileges: the ability to negotiate teachers’ pay directly with their employers, the local education authorities; and teachers’ de facto control of the curriculum, which was ended by the Education Reform Act 1988.

But in a sparkling account of his life and times, You Never Know Your Luck, Reflections of a Cockney Campaigner for Education (2014), Jarvis portrayed himself as a fortunate man. He was born, and had a happy childhood, in a working-class family, in West Ham, east London, where his father, Alfred, was a screener in Spillers’ flour mills. His mother, Emmie (Emily, nee Jones), took the education of young Fred and his brother, Dennis, seriously, and an uncle who had married into the middle class stirred a precocious interest in politics.

Fred escaped unscathed from the bombing of the East End during second world war and, a few years later, the fate of many of his army comrades who died while serving with him on the Normandy beaches. He himself was able to write newspaper articles from the dugouts. On being demobbed, Jarvis took up a cause he had been investing in since his early teens: rights in education.

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At Plaistow secondary school he had written an underground student news-sheet and when caught, changed its name from the Martyrs’ Own to Invicta, which got the headteacher on his side.

In 1941, Spillers moved north to Wallasey, Merseyside. Fred’s ability to get himself noticed was quickly on show at Oldershaw grammar school and in the local communist fronted youth movements. He chose the one that did not have adults in charge. This was to lead to a local youth parliament and after the war getting himself adopted as the Labour candidate for Wallasey in the 1951 election, though he did not win.

By then he was, however, already deep into student politics. He had become chair of the National Association of Labour Student Organisations (Nalso), with a seat on the NUS executive. This was while studying at Liverpool University for a social sciences diploma, from which he emerged with distinction.

Accepted at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, he studied philosophy, politics and economics. It was there that he met Anne Colegrove, a future teacher and chair of education on Barnet council, whom he would marry in 1954.

He decided to put politics before trying to get a first at Oxford. Shirley Williams, a contemporary, remembered a sophistication that made him a “man among boys”. Also by then he was openly fighting the harder left Socialist Society. Except in regard to Anne, a member of the Socialist Society, and thereafter always known as “Fred’s Red”, this was the cold war by proxy.

A taste of the real cold war came soon afterwards, through the executive of the NUS. Jarvis’s initial interests focused on its role in the International Union of Students. He was a delegate at the 1950 IUS conference in Prague, Czechoslovakia. With the Stalinists in charge, and money rolling in from the KGB, the line was to support North Korea (“Korea”) and to expel the “Titoists”, the Yugoslav student union. Opposing these policies on both counts, the British delegation was treated as Public Enemy No 1, even physically taunted.

While this gave Jarvis lasting friendships with leading Europeans on the same side, Olof Palme and Guy Penne (a future African emissary for François Mitterrand) among them, it was a struggle to get support from the NUS executive, not just to disaffiliate from the IUS but to help found the ISC (the International Student Conference).

His presidency of the NUS, 1952-54, was marked by successful campaigns for student grants modelled on the grants ex-serviceman had received and from which Jarvis himself had benefited. He also ran an anti-discrimination case which was taken up by MPs. This, in turn, got him noticed by the NUT, to which he was recruited in 1955 as an assistant secretary. Four years later the NUT created for him, and pioneered for unions as a whole, the job of head of publicity and public relations.

Jarvis fizzed with ideas. In 1959 he gained backing for a massive education and careers exhibition at Olympia, in London, under the patronage of the young Queen. He got her not only to be the patron, but to come in person.

In 1961 the NUT supported him in putting together an independent commission on the need to invest in education “for national survival”. Its members were big names and the issues taken up in several later government commissions of inquiry. Then, two years later, dozens of organisations supported a non-party campaign to make education an issue in the forthcoming election.

The case for comprehensive schools and raising the leaving age figured. When Labour won in 1964, Harold Wilson, the new prime minister, gave an NUT-supported lecture within weeks on education as embodying the hopes of society as a whole. And Jarvis continued to get significant support for the public interest campaign, the Council for Educational Advance.

In the 70s the climate changed. The political debate on the vastly expanding education service turned to issues of economic effectiveness and accountability. The expansion of the teaching profession, which went with comprehensive education and the raising of the school leaving age – policies that fitted the NUT’s core strategy of boosting its membership and its bargaining muscle – were showing up some shortcomings in schools. The NUT was slow to notice that teachers were no longer the solution: they were part of the problem.

The first signs of a public backlash came in 1969 with the Black Papers, launched by two academics, Brian Cox and AE Dyson, attacking low standards in the comprehensives. They were dismissed by an education establishment as the ravings of the New Right, and apparently not taken seriously by Thatcher in her time as minister of education or the new leader of the Conservative party.

However, in 1976, the Labour prime minister, James Callaghan, reacted to the horror stories of out-of-control teachers by setting a new policy line. In a speech at Ruskin College, Oxford, he attacked the “educationists’ consensus that the curriculum was a ‘secret garden’”. This heralded the policy swing of the Thatcher years.

Jarvis had just become general secretary of the NUT, the first non-teacher to hold the post. His famous luck appeared to be running out. While some of the Jarvis skills helped ensure a pay commission that awarded the teachers a big rise, his executive was split between warring factions of the left. Neither his bonhomie nor his persistence in finding the reasonable political solution could keep him off the defensive. It was also unfortunate that he was knocked down by a car and spent time in hospital when crucial decisions were being taken on the London teachers’ strikes.

The Education Reform Act, which Thatcher’s government brought in, was a measure of how far the political pendulum, and public opinion, had swung. The act not only instituted a national curriculum. It diminished the professional status of teachers in removing much of their discretion.

When he stepped down from the NUT, Jarvis seemed to be liberated to fight anew for what he saw as public interest issues in education. This included drawing John Major, then prime minister, into a relatively supportive correspondence on secondary schooling. He also believed he could sow some seeds for a future Labour government.

From the early 90s he convened a group of educationists – professors, headteachers and local education authority officers – as “critical friends” of the Labour party, to develop its line on education. But in the runup to the 1997 election, Tony Blair followed the Thatcher model of distrusting the teachers’ biggest union and all who had been associated with it. The “Fred group” got nowhere near Blair or his advisers.

But Jarvis continued to build on the opportunities his life provided. He pursued his keen interest in politics, education, Europe and, his great hobby, photography in pursuit of his political interests. This led to some great reportorial exhibitions. His unique access to Millbank during the 1997 Labour campaign encouraged him to unearth images of his 50s student politics encounters; and to continue with a series on British schools including his old “Plaistow Sec”, and his lifelong passion, the Hammers, the West Ham football team in whose shadow he had grown up.

Jarvis was active in numerous public bodies, including the Franco-British Council and the council of the National Youth theatre. He and his wife were made honorary citizens of Sainte Cécile les Vignes, a wine-growing village in the Rhône Valley, where they had acquired a small house and were neighbours of Penne, their friend from student days.

In 2015, Jarvis was appointed CBE, but on the day of the investiture, 14 July, preferred to be in France to celebrate the greatest day in the republican calendar – the start of the French revolution.

Anne died in 2007. Jarvis is survived by his son, Robin, and daughter, Jacky.