Jack Tizard

Tizard’s father, John Marsh Tizard, was born in 1885 in the small mining township of Cromwell on the South Island of New Zealand. In 1910, John married Lionelle Washington Ward and commenced training with the police. His father had died in 1908 and in 1913 his mother Emma, Jack’s grandmother, moved with most of her ten children, of whom John was the oldest surviving son, to Timaru, where worked as a policeman in Timaru until being transferred to Stratford in 1916.

In the mid-20th century, large numbers of people with learning disabilities were detained in institutions with little legal protection in the UK, under the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. An organisation campaigning about the plight of people with learning disabilities detained under the 1913 Act was the National Council for Civil Liberties. Jack supported this campaign and wrote several articles which fed into the Royal Commission on the Law Relating to Mental Illness and Mental Deficiency. This reported in 1957 and led to the passing of the 1959 Mental Health Act which completely reformed the 1913 Act.

Jack Tizard CBE (25 February 1919 – 2 August 1979) was a research psychologist, professor of child development, research unit director, international adviser on learning disability and child care, and a president of the British Psychological Society. Tizard was born in New Zealand but spent most of his professional life in England where, as a psychologist, he worked at the boundaries of psychology, medicine, education and the social sciences. His work on alternatives to institutional care in the 1950s and 1960s underpinned the subsequent development of 'ordinary life' models for children and adults with learning disabilities. His later work focused on developing services for young children and their families. Tizard's approach was characterised by a commitment to using high research standards to address important social problems, ensuring through his extensive advisory activities that the results of research were available to practitioners and policy-makers.

Tizard was born on 25 February 1919 in the town of Stratford in the North Island of New Zealand, where his father was a police constable.

Tizard’s parents both contracted tuberculosis. In 1920 the family moved to Tokaanu, a village near Lake Taupō where there were hot springs beneficial to health. Lionelle died there in 1922, aged 33, when Tizard was three years old. After her death, John Tizard and his three children moved back to Timaru to live with the family of Jack’s grandmother, Emma. John Tizard died in 1924 aged 39. Jack Tizard and his two sisters were brought up by their grandmother and six aunts. Also in the household were three other orphaned grandchildren of Emma.

Tizard's later childhood was lived through the global depression and the family suffered a degree of poverty. Tizard attended Timaru Boys' High School. His grandmother Emma died in 1935, at age 79 when Tizard was 16. He obtained a scholarship to Canterbury University College of the University of New Zealand in Christchurch where he chose the subjects of psychology and philosophy. He was fortunate to have as a philosophy lecturer the renowned philosopher of logic and scientific method, Karl Popper, who had moved to New Zealand in 1937 after the Nazis came to power in his native Austria. Jack was very strongly influenced in his later commitment to scientific methodology by Karl Popper. Popper described Tizard as 'the best student I had in New Zealand'.

Jack’s family experiences had reinforced a belief in the need for government action on social issues and he developed a lifelong commitment to Socialism. During Jack’s undergraduate years he had also joined the university Socialist Society and the power of Socialist ideas and policy were confirmed when the New Zealand government passed the Social Security Act 1938, covering unemployment benefit, pensions and universal health care, the first example in the world of comprehensive Welfare State provision. Jack’s war experience was of mixing with fellow soldiers from a very wide variety of backgrounds, reinforcing his distaste for class differences and class prejudice.

Tizard obtained a first class degree in 1940 and was given the award of the University of New Zealand’s Senior Scholar in Philosophy.

At the end of the war, Tizard took up an award he had been granted to study for a PhD at Oxford University. He travelled to the United Kingdom in December 1945. The subject he chose was social history. Jack did not like life in Oxford, including the elitism and snobbishness associated with the university. He did, though, fall in love with an undergraduate, Barbara Parker (1926-2015) and they married in December 1947. To escape Oxford and earn some money, Jack spent a short time as a part-time teacher of logic with his former teacher, Karl Popper, who had been appointed Reader (and later Professor) of Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics. He then took a post as psychology lecturer at St Andrews University. Preferring research to teaching, through contacts in the British Psychological Society Jack was recommended to the psychiatrist Aubrey Lewis who was setting up a new research unit at the Maudsley Hospital in London, funded by the Medical Research Council. This was called the Occupational Adaptation Unit, later changed to the Social Psychiatry Unit. Jack began work there in April 1948. He had continued his studies at Oxford University, but downgraded his degree there from PhD to BLitt, which he was awarded in 1948. He registered for a PhD at London University which he was awarded in 1951.

Jack’s wife Barbara had joined the Communist Party as an undergraduate and Jack also joined. He was a member from 1947 to 1956, when they left the party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Later, Jack’s former membership of the Communist Party caused him some problems in gaining visas to visit America, but because of his high reputation there these were eventually overcome. He remained a lifelong Socialist and from 1956 a member of the Labour Party.

Jack remained at the Social Psychiatry Research Unit from 1948 to 1964 when he was appointed Professor of Child Development at the Institute of Education, University of London. In 1973 he founded the Thomas Coram Research Unit, still under the Institute of Education, and changed his role to become Director. He remained there until his early death in 1979. During these 31 years, Jack published ten books, 74 articles in scientific journals, and 27 chapters in edited books. He also gave numerous conference papers and authored several government reports.

Between 1948 and 1956 Jack, together with his colleague Neil O’Connor, worked on demonstrating the ability of adults with learning disabilities to learn industrial tasks and hence to improve their possibilities of obtaining work. This initially focused on the more able people, but later extended to those with a severe degree of learning disability. Around a dozen articles on this work were published in scientific journals, including the American Journal of Mental Deficiency, thus ensuring that Jack’s work became well known in the USA.

As soon as Jack was introduced to people with learning disabilities in 1948 he realised that services for them were inadequate. He set out to influence policy, not by polemic or anecdote but by high quality science. He developed the effective three-fold strategy of surveying need, establishing model services and evaluating outcomes. His studies generated advice which he disseminated widely through gaining an international reputation as innovator, thinker and researcher. Jack’s major contribution to psychology was to demonstrate that psychological research could be allied to social policy and so become more powerful and relevant. This was an important revelation to many students beginning their careers in psychology and research in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

Jack had also developed a principle that research work should be underpinned by surveys of the extent and nature of problems – an epidemiological approach. In the early 1950s he published several studies of the prevalence and characteristics of people with learning difficulties. He also embarked, with Jacqueline Grad, on a study of 250 families with a member with learning disabilities. In 1962 he published a major study, with Nancy Goodman, of the prevalence of learning disability amongst children. Both the Wessex Project and the Isle of Wight Study, described below, rested on large epidemiological surveys. Jack’s emerging research strategy was to identify issues through comprehensive surveys, and then set up model services to address the issues and evaluate their outcomes.

In 1956 the research was brought together in a book with the title The Social Problem of Mental Deficiency. If a book with that title had been published in the first half of the 20th century it would almost certainly have reflected the agenda of the Eugenics Movement: the belief that social problems such as poverty, unemployment and criminality result from learning disabilities being inherited through families, and that the solution lies in programmes of sterilisation, incarceration or even extermination. Jack and Neil’s approach was very different. They believed, and demonstrated, that people with learning disabilities could be taught skills and that they could carry out work and did not need to be detained in institutions.

Jack was a consultant on learning disability to the World Health Organisation and also to the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, a branch of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. For the UK Department of Health he was adviser on learning disability, a member of the Chief Scientist’s Research Committee, Chair of the Advisory Committee on Handicapped Children, and a member of the Court Committee on Child Health Services. He was a member of the Social Science Research Council and Chair of its Educational Board. He was adviser to the Home Office Research Unit. He was a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, an honorary member of the British Paediatric Association, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, and a member of and adviser on learning disability to the Association for Child Psychology and Psychiatry (now called the Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health). He was one of the first to join the Society for Social Medicine on its founding in 1956.

In 1962 Jack negotiated substantial long-term funding from the Department of Health for an ambitious project based on his research strategy. A doctor with experience of epidemiology and care of people with learning disabilities, Albert Kushlick, was appointed to develop and lead this project, working from the Wessex Regional Hospital Board in Winchester. The first step was to carry out a comprehensive epidemiological survey of people with learning disabilities in the population of 2 million people served by the Wessex Board. This enabled cohorts of children, and later severely disabled adults, from smaller population areas to be identified and moved from large hospitals to 'locally based hospital units' (LBHUs), homes of 20 places with a developmental rather than custodial emphasis situated within the areas close to their families. The feasibility of such services, and the outcomes for residents and families, would be evaluated.

Probably the most influential work in the whole of Jack’s career was the book Community Services for the Mentally Handicapped, published in 1964. This outlined the research findings on employability, on the benefits of small scale care and on the needs of families. On the basis of this research he put forward a blueprint for a comprehensive system of care for people with learning disabilities based in their local communities: 'community care' that could meet their needs in a more humane and successful way. The book pioneered the thinking that would lead eventually to the closure of nearly all institutional care for people with learning disabilities in the UK and their replacement with small-scale, developmentally oriented local services. Jack’s ideas were also put forward in an influential publication by the President’s Commission on Mental Retardation in 1969, ensuring their influence in the USA as well.

In 1964 a Chair in Child Development was established at the Institute of Education, University of London, funded by the charity then called The Spastics Society (now called Scope). The post was offered to Jack who became Professor of Child Development. His brief was to develop research as well as teaching activities that would still have an emphasis on disability but would also offer opportunities for the study of wider issues affecting children. Jack had already been involved in an epidemiological study of delinquency and maladjustment in children.

Jack was granted two prestigious American awards for his work on learning disability. In 1968, jointly with Neil O’Connor, he received the Kennedy Foundation International Award for Scientific Research in Mental Retardation, and in 1973 the Research Award of the American Association on Mental Deficiency (now the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities). Also in 1973 he was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Honours List. His socialist principles caused him to consider refusing this, but he decided it would help him to influence policy and gain research grants.

In collaboration with the child psychiatrist Michael Rutter and a senior medical officer at the Department of Health, Kingsley Whitmore, Jack had also initiated and negotiated funding for a major study of disability amongst a complete cohort of children aged 9 to 12 years on the Isle of Wight. In the total population of the island of around 100,000 people there were 3,500 children in this age range. The collaborative project demonstrated another key feature of Jack’s research, the bringing together of different fields and disciplines in the study of social issues. The work was reported in a 400-page book Education, Health and Behaviour (1970), with Jack as co-editor. The main surveys were carried out in 1964 and 1965 though follow-up work continued for another ten years. The extent of intellectual or educational disability, psychiatric disorder and physical disability was assessed. It was found that one in six children had a degree of one or more of these issues sufficient to entail 'considerable interference with their ability to lead a normal life'. The final chapter of the book discussed implications for effective service provision. In 1998 to 2000 there was a further follow-up of some of the children into mid-life, with a focus on literacy and mental health.

In the early 1970s Jack negotiated with the Department of Health for long-term funding of a unit dedicated solely to research projects that could be coordinated and would ensure the building up of multi-disciplinary expertise. The Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU), again under the auspices of the Institute of Education, was established in 1973 with Jack as Director. Between then and Jack’s death in 1979 the number of researchers increased from 18 to 37, with funding from ten different agencies. The unit continued with studies of children, and in some cases adults, with learning and other disabilities but greatly expanded studies of children in families, in foster care, in nurseries, in pre-school education and in residential care

Jack was sceptical of genetic explanations of human differences and in the 1970s he got involved in two related controversies on this topic.

The Wessex project fed in to several parallel political and professional developments. Politically, a number of scandals of ill-treatment of people in large hospitals led to highly critical public inquiries, and in 1971 a government White Paper, Better Services for the Mentally Handicapped, recommended a reduction of half in the number of places in hospitals and their replacement by community-based facilities. Professionally, the philosophy of 'normalisation', providing services that give people experiences as close as possible to those generally valued in ordinary society, had gained much support in Scandinavia, the USA, the UK and other countries.

In parallel with the Wessex Project, Jack had initiated and secured funding for a study of management practices in different kinds of residential provision for children, with a focus on those with learning disabilities. These studies were published in the book Patterns of Residential Care in 1971. This documented in detail the findings from 16 residential services on measures of management practice. Children’s homes and local authority hostels were found to operate in a more child-centred and beneficial way than long-stay hospitals. The book included recommendations for improved practice in all residential services.

As well as continuing his involvement in the projects he had already initiated, during his time as Professor at the Institute of Education Jack widened his research interests. For example, in 1971 with his wife Barbara, he carried out a study of two-year-old children in residential nurseries, and in 1972 he spent three weeks in Jamaica, again with Barbara, studying the effects of malnutrition on child development and giving a conference paper on the topic. He expanded his advisory work and published articles on a wide range of topics as well as overseeing many research projects carried out by colleagues and students.

The American writer on leadership, John Maxwell, has said: "A leader is great, not because of his or her power, but because of his or her ability to empower others". One of Jack’s strengths was his ability to initiate and negotiate funding for research projects, but then to empower others to develop the project and report the findings. Among those benefiting from Jack’s generosity in this respect were J G Lyle in the Brooklands project, Albert Kushlick in the Wessex project, Michael Rutter in the Isle of Wight study, Roy King and Norma Raynes in the Child Welfare Project, Berry Mayall and Pat Petrie in the childminding project at TCRU, and many more. Many of Jack’s students and colleagues went on to pursue further psychological or sociological research to influence policy and improve service quality. In the field of learning disability alone, researchers who had worked on Jack’s projects became Founders or Directors (or both) of the Hester Adrian Research Centre at the University of Manchester, the Mental Handicap in Wales Applied Research Unit at Cardiff University, the British Institute of Learning Disability, the Learning Disability Team at the King’s Fund Centre in London and the Tizard Centre at the University of Kent. In wider fields, many went on to hold Professorships and research posts at universities in education, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and criminology, studying a wide range of aspects of social policy, especially in relation to children. The Thomas Coram Research Unit, established by Jack in 1973, continues its work to the present day.

In 1975 Jack, with Ian Sinclair and Ronald Clarke, edited the book Varieties of Residential Experience, a collection of studies of different kinds of residential care for children and young people. This described different patterns of care and their effects on residents in homes for children with learning disabilities, residential nurseries, approved schools, probation hostels, other 'correctional' units and homes for autistic children. Recommendations were made for improved care.

In 1975-6, Jack was President of the British Psychological Society.

A priority for Jack on establishing TCRU was services for young children and their families, which he thought in urgent need of reform. He applied to them his research strategy, including surveys of the conditions and needs of families and the establishment and evaluation of a model service, in this case multi-purpose Children’s Centres available to all families in their catchment areas, with two such Centres set up in inner city areas of London. Although ignored by government at the time, Children’s Centres were to become a flagship policy of the new Labour government 30 years later. Jack, together with Peter Moss and Jane Perry, set out his ideas on early childhood services in the 1976 book All Our Children, including a central role for Children’s Centres. All Our Children also highlighted Jack’s concerns about childminding: that it was characterised by little research, few resources, a lack of training and ineffective regulation. He therefore initiated a major research study on this topic.

Jack was not afraid to challenge government policy. For example, in 1976 he gave a powerful rebuttal to the notion that services for young children and their families could and should be provided cheaply, at a conference with the title 'Low Cost Day Provision for Under Fives' organised by the Department of Health and Social Security. At the time of his death, Jack was working on a project on the involvement of parents in helping their children’s reading ability. His reports of this work were published posthumously.

In December 1978, after increasing pain and weight loss, Jack was diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer. He died on 2 August 1979. He was 60 years old. He had continued to go into work until a month before his death. Barbara wrote a moving account of this period. A renowned researcher in her own right, she was appointed to succeed Jack as Director of the Thomas Coram Research Unit.