In his autobiography Nevill Mott tells us that, when he became Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge in 1954, he was persuaded by Sir Philip Morris, the Vice-Chancellor of Bristol, to devote time to national educational issues. He joined Geoffrey Crowther’s Committee on Education from 16 to 18 in 1956, and in 1959 the Ministry of Education’s Committee on the Training of Teachers, chaired by John Fulton. Nevill was invited to take the chair of a subcommittee principally concerned with the shortage of mathematics teachers. Thus he began a series of commitments to educational issues which lasted into the 1980s.