Greg Brooks obituary

Other lives: Expert in literacy who served on panels looking at how to improve children’s reading and writing skills

My friend Greg Brooks, who has died aged 81, made his name as an expert on literacy at the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), with whom he worked for a significant part of his career.

Greg’s research there spanned the initial teaching of reading and spelling, family literacy, intervention schemes for children with poor skills, the assessment of children’s speaking ability and evaluations of educational initiatives that try to make improvements.

However, his most abiding interest lay in the use of phonics, which in his view was the best approach to the teaching of reading and spelling.

While at the NFER Greg wrote What Works for Children With Literacy Difficulties, a textbook for teachers that is still in print. Later he moved to the school of education at Sheffield University, where he held a personal chair, becoming an emeritus professor on retirement in 2007.

Born in Ewell, Surrey, to Mary (nee McDarby), and Norman Brooks, an electrician, he was named Raymond, but was known for most of his life as Greg. At Wimbledon college secondary school his gift for Latin and classical Greek earned him an open exhibition to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied classics and philosophy before pursuing a PhD on phonological coding in silent reading at the University of Leeds.

Afterwards he taught at Kenyatta College, in Nairobi, Kenya, then at Friends’ school in Saffron Walden, Essex, before joining the NFER in Slough in 1981. He moved to Sheffield University in 2000.

Much in demand nationally for his expertise, Greg was a member of the government’s independent review committee, led by Sir Jim Rose, which looked into the teaching of reading in English primary schools and published a report in 2009. In addition he was the only British member of the EU High Level Group of Experts on Literacy, which issued a report in 2012 setting out ways to combat low literacy levels in Europe, and he served on the national executive committee of the UK Reading Association, acting as its president in 1999-2000.

Greg loved travel, classical music, art, archaeology and Lagavulin whisky; he always lived life to the full.

His 1966 marriage to Dodie Simmonds ended in divorce in 2000; in 2010 he married a research colleague, Maxine Burton. She survives him, as do his sons, Michael and Christopher, from his first marriage, two grandchildren and his siblings Peter and Catherine.