Peter Scopes
Son of missionaries in south India who became a mathematician and educationalist in Tanganyika
PETER SCOPES, who has died aged 86, was a colonial education officer in Tanganyika in the run-up to independence, and subsequently principal of a teachers’ training college in Dar es Salaam.
The first of four sons, he was born on August 22 1928 in Madras, south India, where his parents were missionaries. After early education at Highclerc School, Kodaikanal, a school for the sons and daughters of missionaries in the Palni Hills of south India, he was sent back to England at the age of 10 to the boarding school at Eltham College, south east London. Early in the war, after that part of the school was evacuated to Taunton School, Peter returned to India and to Highclerc, where he took his School Certificate in 1944.
He then returned to Taunton School (and subsequently Eltham College, when the boarding school relocated back to London after VE Day) to take his Higher School Certificate.
Although he was interested in science, he had not been taught physics at Highclerc, so at first the staff refused to let him enter for science subjects. But he persisted and went on, in 1946, to win a scholarship to read Mathematics at Cambridge, where he went after two years National Service, in 1949.
After graduation and a year teaching in the United States, Scopes qualified as a teacher in London and in 1954 joined the Overseas Civil Service (the former Colonial Service). Posted to Tanganyika as an education officer, he
remained there for 15 years, teaching at schools in Songea, Tabora, Mpwapwa and Dar es Salaam, and writing Mathematics for Primary
School Teachers (published in 1969) a manual for teachers in developing countries.
A year after the country’s independence as Tanzania in 1961, he was transferred to Mpwapwa Teacher Training College and the following year was appointed principal of Dar es Salaam Teachers’ College, the first college to train African and Indian students together. The college attracted substantial support from the American aid budget, including £330,000 for new buildings, and Scopes was there to greet Julius Nyerere, President of Tanzania, when he came to open them.
In 1967, however, while Scopes was on leave, his position was “Africanised”, and two years later he retired from the Overseas Civil Service.
From 1969 to 1982 he was head of mathematics at Avery Hill College, south-east London, and wrote his second book, Mathematics in
Secondary Schools – a Teaching
Approach (1973). In 1983 he was appointed senior education adviser with the Overseas Development Administration. This took him on tours to the Middle East, the Atlantic (including the Falkland Islands and St Helena) and the Far East. He also became involved in the ODA’s biggest educational aid programme, the Andhra Pradesh Primary Education Project – aimed at providing one classroom and one trained teacher in every village in the southern Indian state where he had grown up.
After his official retirement, he worked in various consultancies and gave teacher training seminars for the British Council.
For 47 years Scopes was a lay preacher and he also served for four years as a Liberal Democrat on Bexley Council.
In 1955 he married Jennifer Davis, who predeceased him in 2012. He is survived by their two sons and two daughters. Peter Scopes, born August 22 1928, died July 26 2015