My friend and former colleague Hilary Hester Ives, who has died aged 88, was an expert on teaching bilingual children.
Working from the Inner London Education Authority (Ilea) and the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education from the late 1960s to the 90s, Hilary developed a pedagogy that focused on developing the language skills of children at different stages of learning English through collaborative group work in the mainstream classroom – and in the context of a curriculum appropriate for a changing multicultural society. Based on extensive research by teachers throughout the country, this was widely disseminated to teachers through in-service training.
Hilary was born in Aldershot, Hampshire, to Len Shreeves, a soldier, and his wife, Joan, a shopkeeper. Educated at Guildford grammar school for girls, she qualified as a teacher in 1955 after studying at Whitelands College in Roehampton, south-west London, where she met John Hester.
They married in 1956, and after a spell teaching in a Reading primary school, she and John moved to Ethiopia in 1958 with their baby son, Simon. Hilary taught English in secondary schools in Addis Ababa, where a second child, Siân, was born, but she disliked the stultifying expatriate life and returned to the UK in 1964.
For the next two years she taught in primary schools in Harlow, Essex, and in London, until the Schools Council Project took her on secondment in 1967 as a teacher and writer on its English for Immigrant Children programme. The same year she and John were divorced.
In 1970 Hilary moved to Ilea’s Centre for Urban Educational Studies (Cues) as a senior lecturer, leading curriculum development projects and training in-service teachers for the next 16 years. For a period from 1982 to 1984 she was also seconded to the Schools Council to direct its Language in the Multicultural Primary Classroom programme, on which I worked with her.
In 1986 Hilary left Cues to join the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education, where she developed Hester’s Stages of English Learning, which was widely used by local education authorities in the UK, and where she remained until her retirement in 1994.
In the same year that she and John were divorced, she married an old friend, John Ives, with whom she shared an active life of hiking, camping and sailing along the coast of East Anglia. When he died in 1994 she got together with Larry Grant, who had also recently been bereaved, and they lived in Southwold in Suffolk, where she joined a women’s sea swimming group and developed a beautiful garden at their home.
After Larry died in 2003 Hilary returned to London “to get away from the Daily Mail readers”, and lived an independent life in Tufnell Park in a big house full of books and colour. In 2020 she had a serious fall and moved to a care home.
She is survived by her children, six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
