Jack Tizard CBE 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.
62 Facts About Jack Tizard
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Jack 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.
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Jack 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.
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Jack Tizard's father, John Marsh Jack Tizard, was born in 1885 in the small mining township of Cromwell on the South Island of New Zealand.
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Jack Tizard's 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.
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Lionelle died there in 1922, aged 33, when Jack Tizard was three years old.
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Jack Tizard obtained a scholarship to Canterbury University College of the University of New Zealand in Christchurch, where he chose the subjects of psychology and philosophy.
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Jack Tizard 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.
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Jack Tizard was very strongly influenced in his later commitment to scientific methodology by Karl Popper.
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Jack Tizard obtained a first class degree in 1940 and was given the award of the University of New Zealand's Senior Scholar in Philosophy.
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World War II broke out before Jack Tizard completed his studies.
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Jack Tizard spent five years in the field ambulance service in Greece, North Africa and Italy, as a medical orderly and stretcher bearer.
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Jack Tizard was involved in the major battles of El Alamein and Monte Cassino.
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Jack Tizard travelled to the United Kingdom in December 1945.
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Jack Tizard did not like life in Oxford, including the elitism and snobbishness associated with the university.
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Jack Tizard did, though, fall in love with an undergraduate, Barbara Parker and they married in December 1947.
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Jack Tizard then took a post as psychology lecturer at St Andrews University.
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Jack Tizard had continued his studies at Oxford University, but downgraded his degree there from PhD to BLitt, which he was awarded in 1948.
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Jack Tizard registered for a PhD at London University which he was awarded in 1951.
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At university, Jack Tizard was a member of the Radical Club and campaigned as a student for university education to be free and for the system to be less exam-bound and more relevant to real world problems.
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Jack Tizard was a member from 1947 to 1956, when they left the party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
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Jack Tizard remained a lifelong Socialist and from 1956 a member of the Labour Party.
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Jack Tizard supported this campaign and wrote several articles which fed into the Royal Commission on the Law Relating to Mental Illness and Mental Deficiency.
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Jack Tizard's Socialism informed his use of research data in his advisory work, his choice of research topics and his criticism of the triviality of much psychological and sociological research.
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Jack Tizard 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.
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Jack Tizard remained there until his early death in 1979.
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Jack Tizard gave numerous conference papers and authored several government reports.
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Around a dozen articles on this work were published in scientific journals, including the American Journal of Mental Deficiency, thus ensuring that Jack Tizard's work became well known in the USA.
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Jack Tizard embarked, with Jacqueline Grad, on a study of 250 families with a member with learning disabilities.
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Jack Tizard'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.
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Apart from the early promotion of workshops for training and employment of adults with learning disabilities, the first model service set up and evaluated by Jack Tizard was the Brooklands experiment, bugun in 1958.
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Probably the most influential work in the whole of Jack Tizard's career was the book Community Services for the Mentally Handicapped, published in 1964.
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Jack Tizard's ideas were put forward in an influential publication by the President's Commission on Mental Retardation in 1969, ensuring their influence in the US as well.
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In 1962 Jack Tizard negotiated substantial long-term funding from the Department of Health for an ambitious project based on his research strategy.
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In parallel with the Wessex Project, Jack Tizard 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.
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In collaboration with the child psychiatrist Michael Rutter and a senior medical officer at the Department of Health, Kingsley Whitmore, Jack Tizard had 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.
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The post was offered to Jack Tizard who became Professor of Child Development.
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Jack Tizard's brief was to develop research as well as teaching activities that would still have an emphasis on disability but would offer opportunities for the study of wider issues affecting children.
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Jack Tizard had already been involved in an epidemiological study of delinquency and maladjustment in children.
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Jack Tizard 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.
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Jack Tizard 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.
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At the time of his death, Jack Tizard was working on a project on the involvement of parents in helping their children's reading ability.
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Many of the projects Jack Tizard initiated at the Institute of Education were linked, as were most of those at the Thomas Coram Research Unit.
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Cyril Burt was a British psychologist whom Jack Tizard had previously greatly admired.
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Jack Tizard had published studies of identical twins reared apart, in order to work out the relative influence of genetics or environment on their development.
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Jack Tizard was among a number of people who became suspicious that Burt had faked at least some of his data, and he investigated and wrote about this, particularly discovering that co-workers that Burt had claimed he worked with on the twin studies did not exist.
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The high quality and pioneer nature of Jack Tizard's research led to him being invited to join or contribute to many advisory and policy bodies.
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Jack Tizard always welcomed these opportunities to try to ensure that decisions were taken on the basis of good evidence rather than polemic.
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Jack Tizard was a consultant on learning disability to the World Health Organisation and to the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, a branch of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
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Jack Tizard was a member of the Social Science Research Council and chair of its Educational Board.
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Jack Tizard was adviser to the Home Office Research Unit.
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Jack Tizard 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.
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Jack Tizard was one of the first to join the Society for Social Medicine on its founding in 1956.
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Jack Tizard was granted two prestigious American awards for his work on learning disability.
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Jack Tizard was very successful in achieving the award of large grants for major research projects, from the Department of Health, the Medical Research Council, and some American organisations such as the Association for the Aid of Crippled Children.
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In December 1978, after increasing pain and weight loss, Jack Tizard was diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer.
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Jack Tizard had continued to go into work until a month before his death.
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Jack Tizard possessed a very effective combination of a likeable personality and great persuasiveness.
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Jack Tizard set out to influence policy, not by polemic or anecdote but by high quality science.
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Jack Tizard developed the effective three-fold strategy of surveying need, establishing model services and evaluating outcomes.
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Jack Tizard's studies generated advice which he disseminated widely through gaining an international reputation as innovator, thinker and researcher.
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One of Jack Tizard'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.