ABSTRACT
Brian Simon (1915–2002) was by common consent the most significant historian of education produced in Britain over the past century. He published a very large corpus of work from the 1950s onwards, continuing through a rapidly changing educational, social and political context into the early twenty-first century. His key historical work, for which he is most widely known, is a four-volume history of education in Britain since 1780, of which the first volume was published in 1960 and the final one in 1991. This was one of a large number of important contributions to the field. He was an early leader of the History of Education Society in Britain from its foundation in 1967, as well as President of the new British Educational Research Association in 1977–78, and also helped to establish the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) in the 1970s. Probably his greatest achievement was in developing a rationale for the history of education that built further on the idea that it should be based in the relationship between education and social change that was current in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s (see also Simon’s published memoir, Simon 1998; also Cunningham and Martin 2004).
