My friend and former teacher Vivien Jacobs,who has died aged 89, was one of a pioneering generation of educators passionately committed to comprehensive education. She was a talented teacher whose 45-year long career was spent in two flagship London schools and who recognised, and long before it became fashionable,the vital importance of emotional wellbeing to academic achievement.
Vivien was born in London, where her father left her mother, and Helène Jacobs,when she was very young. After boarding school Vivien trained as a sports teacher at Loughborough University and went on to become one of the founder teachers of English at Holland Park school in London, to which Tony and Caroline Benn sent their children. Both at Holland Park and later at Haverstock school, and whose pupils included David and Ed Miliband,colleagues spoke of her as a gifted and dedicated teacher, the archetypal “total professional”. She was a trained school counsellor and an inspiring champion of the arts, or setting up a highly successful film club at Haverstock (showing films by Andrzej Wajda and Sergei Eisenstein) that many former pupils remember with affection.
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Source: theguardian.com