Introduction

Sir Alec Clegg, unduly overlooked by educationalists and policy-makers today, was one of the most significant and widely admired 20th-century educational administrators. His educational vision and his leadership skills provided the impulse and direction for teachers to fully support young people’s emotional development, to meet their sensory needs, through the arts. Clegg’s public addresses and extensive writing are coloured with reflections on his own development as teacher and educational administrator. His managerial style entailed listening carefully to the viewpoints of teachers and advisers, and close observation of their work in schools fed his philosophical approach to policy-making. In a context of teachers’ lives and careers, Peter Darvill’s own life course offers important insights, read against his biography of Clegg. Children’s well-being, high on the agenda for education and for health services, in Clegg’s time was generally seen as a relatively marginal issue.