21 hours ago
Claire Callender obituary
As an expert on student funding and graduate experiences of indebtedness, my sister, Claire Callender, who has died of cancer aged 71, made significant contributions to the debate about student funding at a local and international level, and played a central role in government policy and public discussion for three decades.
At the time of her death Claire held joint professorships at UCL Institute of Education and Birkbeck, University of London. She was appointed OBE for services to higher education in 2017.
She was born in London, a twin of Ne'eman, and the daughter of Lydia (nee Berkman) and Martin Callender, who had been a Lt Col in the British army in India during the second world war and went on to become an economist and management consultant. The war and the Holocaust cast a giant shadow over the family, and had a profound influence on Claire, shaping her sense of Jewish identity and her lifelong dedication to social justice.
Claire attended Notting Hill and Ealing high school and completed a degree in social administration and sociology at Bristol in 1979. After a period as a community worker in the Beit She'an Community Centre in Israel, she received her PhD in gender and social policy at the University of Wales in 1988.
When tuition fees were introduced in 1998 into what had been a free higher education system, Claire became a staunch advocate of maintenance grants and dedicated herself to drawing attention, in public and to policy makers, to the challenges that resulted from student debt.
Claire's first chair appointment was at London South Bank University as professor of social policy (1998-2008) and early in the Blair years she spent time in the Cabinet Office on secondment as head of research in the women's unit. She reported to numerous parliamentary select committees, and all the major reviews of student funding that took place in the UK after 1997, including the most recent review, the Augar report of 2019.
In 2006-07 she was a visiting scholar at the Harvard graduate school of education, and was a Fulbright New Century scholar in 2007-08. Her post as professor of higher education policy at Birkbeck began in 2008, followed by the professorship of higher education studies at the Institute of Education (which later merged with UCL) in 2010.
In 2014, under the leadership of Simon Marginson, Claire was named deputy director of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) and was central to CGHE research management. Claire's contributions to research scholarship included more than 125 books, reports and chapters, more than 30 peer-reviewed journal papers, and numerous conference and seminar presentations. She was renowned for her generosity as a mentor to young researchers, and for the warmth that she evoked in old and new acquaintances.
With her longtime partner, Annette Zera, an educationist, Claire loved to travel - there was not a corner of the globe they hadn't visited – and she also enjoyed cooking, gardening and going to the theatre.
Claire is survived by Annette, Ne'eman and me.
