Dr Margaret Smart’s profound Roman Catholic faith, affection for nuns, compassion for the disadvantaged and, not least, her “uniform” of high-necked blouses, tight bun and pearls may have led the casual observer to assume she had a religious vocation. Yet it was a path in education that Margaret chose, and for 15 years she taught French in Catholic secondary schools and colleges of higher education.
A natural authority and fine sense of organisation took her into the upper tiers of educational management. In 1975 she was appointed one of Her Majesty’s inspectors of schools for modern languages and teacher training and in 1992, when Ofsted took over, left with the title of chief inspector for higher education. In retirement she was the natural choice as a member of the Bishops’ Conference committee for higher education. A year later Cardinal Basil Hume asked her to serve on the Diocese of Westminster Education Service and she went on to be director of the Catholic Education Service (CES).
Margaret was not a newcomer to writing — she had in her teaching career co-authored five textbooks on French — and in 1997 she published The Common Good in Education, a work that applied the principles of Catholic social teaching to education. The book marked a high point for the CES, reflecting the unanimity of the Bishops’ Conference on educational policy, and reached an audience beyond the Catholic Church. The CES was mentioned in the House of Lords when the new Labour government under Tony Blair was introducing the 1998 Education Act.
A year later Margaret wrote Education for Love, the result of extensive consultation with parents, teachers, governors, priests and others to encourage teachers in their understanding of the Church’s moral principles. In 1998 she was awarded an honorary doctorate of law by the University of Birmingham and a year later was appointed OBE. In 2008 Pope Benedict XVI made her a Dame of the Order of St Gregory the Great.
Margaret Lord was born in 1937 in Ashton-under-Lyne, Greater Manchester. Her father, Richard, was a manager for British Rail and her mother, Winifred (née Elwood), was a housewife. Both her parents came from Lancastrian Catholic families and Margaret and her older sister Freda were educated at the Ursuline convent in Kettering, and at the Notre Dame convent, Northampton.
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Margaret went to Leicester University to study French and in 1969 was awarded a master’s in education by the University of Birmingham. In her teenage years she had worked at the City of the Poor in Lourdes, and during the summer holidays she helped to organise camps for disadvantaged Catholic children in the Archdiocese of Birmingham.
Until her late thirties Margaret lived with her parents but on a teaching course in Paris she met a French graduate, Richard Smart, six years her junior, who became the headmaster of Hampton School in southwest London. They married in 1976; Richard predeceased her in 1993.
Thereafter Margaret concentrated on the CES and the Westminster education service, as well as being a governor of a college of higher education in Birmingham, and of Mayfield School in East Sussex.
If Margaret was devout, she was also good company, smoking cigarettes in her earlier years and happy to raise a glass or two of wine, gin or champagne. There were no children — just two doted-upon golden labradors — but she was delighted to entertain nephews and nieces, making use of her teaching skills with, for example, a homemade orchestra of upturned washing-up bottles and glasses of water. She loved sport, particularly cricket, rugby and football. Phone calls were ignored when the cricket was on. For her 70th birthday she was treated to a one-day international at Lord’s.