Maggie Ross obituary

My wife, Maggie Ross, who has died suddenly aged 73, was an inspiring early years educator, who brought practical compassion and understanding in supporting the families of young children. As the manager of nurseries and early years centres in London, she had a particular flair for helping her staff to aspire to develop their careers.

Born in Bristol, Maggie was the daughter of Barbara (nee Bees) and John Beall, a vicar and educator. She spent some of her early life in Kerala, south India, where her father taught, before returning to parishes in Bristol and then Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire. She went to Accrington high school.

Maggie and I first met in late 1971 at Soas University of London, where she was taking a BA in linguistics and social anthropology; we married the following year. She trained as an early years teacher, and then took a course in teaching bilingual children at the Inner London Education Authority’s centre for urban educational studies. Her experience of teaching groups of young children in Hackney, coupled with her understanding of linguistic development, led her to realise that bilingual young children’s language competence depended on them maintaining their home language as an essential precondition to learning English.

She put this into practice, in 1977 joining Thomas Buxton Infants school in Tower Hamlets, where the school population was largely of Bangladeshi origin. With the help of parents and committed colleagues, she pioneered the use of dual language “real books” with young children.

After a short break when our children, Susanna and David, were born, she moved to teach in the nursery class at Highbury Quadrant primary school. Pupils had a diverse range of languages, and the school was targeted with racial abuse – and vilified by elements of the press when the staff held a 70 ^th birthday party for Nelson Mandela in 1988.

In the summer of 1990 Maggie rose to a very different challenge. When she and I were taking our children, aged six and nine, to holiday in south India, our plane stopped to refuel in Kuwait just as Iraqi forces were invading. Passengers and crew became hostages of Saddam Hussein, and for a month we were held in dire conditions, partly on a nuclear site.

Maggie supported our children through this with calmness and determination. After four weeks, women and children were freed, and she re-joined her school in London the next day, as the term started, combining teaching with campaigning for my release, which came over three months later.

In the late 1990s she moved to the University of North London to lecture in early years education and language. Missing daily contact with young children, she returned to work in early years centres. Between 2001 and 2011 she managed three nurseries in Islington and north Westminster: Springdale, Dorothy Gardner and New River Green.

There she combined her experience of teaching professional courses with a talent for identifying potential in people. She encouraged her staff to gain qualifications and advance their careers, in particular championing those from ethnic minority backgrounds to look to managerial roles.

When she retired, she began to work as a volunteer in Holloway and Pentonville prisons, helping organise family days, when children could play with their imprisoned parents.

Maggie is survived by me, her two children and four grandsons.