Ted Milburn obituary

Other lives: Youth worker who became the first professor of community education in the UK, at Strathclyde University

My husband, Ted Milburn, who has died aged 88, devoted his life to youth and community education. Having worked for the YMCA in Huddersfield in the early 1960s, Ted became head of the Marmion further education centre, in Brighton, Sussex. He was ably supported in both these positions by his first wife, Joan (nee Teasdale).

He saw beyond the moral panic surrounding the brawls between the mods and rockers, perceiving instead the needs of the young people concerned. He and his team opened the centre to provide a service of hot food and shelter, reducing tension between the opposing groups.

Born in Morpeth, Northumberland, the only child of Muriel (nee Dale), a shop assistant, and George Milburn, a nurse, Ted developed tuberculosis as a child, and the resulting debility meant he missed two years of primary education and as a result failed the 11-plus exam. He went to Morpeth secondary modern school and started work as a railway clerk at the town’s station in 1953. He attended night classes in Newcastle, trained at the YMCA College in London and later graduated with a first-class degree in sociology from the University of Sussex in 1973.

Ted’s early experiences fuelled his belief in offering people second chances and he helped to create environments in which those who had been written off might thrive. He moved to Scotland to become a community education officer in Renfrew (1973), then to lecture at the University of Strathclyde and became assistant director of education in Strathclyde in 1986. He returned to the University of Strathclyde as a senior lecturer before being inaugurated as professor of community education, the first in the UK, in 2000.

Ted’s positive approach to youth work was matched by his scholarly acumen; he wrote for a number of leading publishers in education. However, it was as a skilled communicator, a warm and supportive colleague and teacher that he was best known.

His services were in demand across the UK and Europe, particularly in the former Soviet states of Moldova, Poland, Ukraine and Hungary for a decade from 1993. He was chair of the Prince’s Trust for Strathclyde and South Scotland (now the King’s Trust, 1998-2003), president of the YMCA in Scotland (2005-12), director of the Centre for Youth Work Studies (1995-2003), editor of the Scottish Youth Issues Journal (2000-03), and the inspiration for the Ted Milburn scholarship, which was open to students of youth work and community education who would otherwise not be able to go to university.

He is survived by me and by his son, Richard, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce in 1982. Ted and I met at a youth work conference in 1996 and married in 2001.