My father, Jonathan Brown, who has died aged 88, was an expert in adult education who moved from schoolteaching into working on policy initiatives designed to encourage the extension of educational opportunity to older students.
He began his career in adult education in 1966, as a lecturer at the Police Staff College in Bramshill, Hampshire, before moving in 1970 to the adult education department at Newcastle University as a lecturer in politics. There he set up courses directed specifically at women who had been bypassed by mainstream education, and successfully encouraged BBC Radio Newcastle to invest in educational programming for adults. He was also a political pundit on local radio and TV during local and general elections.
In 1977 Jonathan joined the Open University as a senior counsellor, working there for more than 20 years before retiring as professor of educational guidance in 1999. The OU was his ideal forum, with an agenda based around the extension of educational opportunity. He took on many roles there, including developing the European Scheme, which took the OU into English-speaking institutions and homes across continental Europe.
In 1982 he helped set up the National Association of Educational Guidance for Adults, becoming its founder chair, then vice-president and president. His advocacy for guidance at a national level led to his involvement in the work of the Unit for the Development of Adult Continuing Education, a government-funded body designed to examine policy and practice in the education and training of adults, and was part of the team that wrote its 1986 report, The Challenge of Change: Developing Educational Guidance for Adults.
A member of the northern district committee of the Workers Educational Association, he worriedly repeatedly - and prophetically, as it turned out - about the organisation's finances. In 2010 he edited a collection of essays, The Right to Learn: the WEA in the North of England 1910-2010.
Jonathan was born in Birmingham to Tom Brown, a miner, and Moina (nee Cobb), a teacher. He went to Henry Mellish grammar school in Nottingham and then to St Catherine's College, University of Oxford, where he read PPE. After graduating he went straight into teaching history and English literature in the early 1960s at the Ratcliffe school in Wolverton, Buckinghamshire, and then at Bicester school in Oxfordshire before switching to adult education.
In his spare time Jonathan loved to watch sport, particularly athletics and rugby. He also travelled widely across Europe and had a broad interest in literature and the arts.
His wife, Jean (nee Danson), whom he married in 1963, died in 2020. He is survived by me, two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.