Sir Cyril Taylor
Educator and social entrepreneur BORN MAY 14, 1935 DIED JANUARY 29, 2018 AGED 82
SIR Cyril Taylor advised 10 Conservative and Labour education secretaries over two decades and was the driving force behind the development of city technology colleges, later known as academies.
There are now almost 3,000 specialist schools and academies and Taylor is thought to have raised £350million for them. He had previously launched the American Institute for Foreign Study, which established summer campuses at European universities for American high school students and vice versa.
In the 1980s Taylor was a member of the Centre for Policy Studies and deputy Tory leader on the Greater London Council.
After the GLC was wound up in 1986 he set up a CPS conference and city technology colleges were born.
Cyril Julian Hebden Taylor was born in Leeds, the son of Methodist missionaries who had been in the then Belgian Congo.
His father died before Taylor was born, leaving his mother with him and his four sisters. When he was six months old his mother went back to the Congo but the family later returned first to Leeds and then London where he attended St Marylebone Grammar School.
He was commissioned into the East Surrey Regiment for National Service and seconded to the King’s African Rifles before going to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to read History.
He worked as a brand manager at Procter & Gamble’s headquarters in Cincinnati and developed the idea of the American Institute for Foreign Study while helping his future wife organise a school trip to France.
He left Procter & Gamble to launch AIFS and in 1969 sold it to the National Student Marketing Company. He and his partners bought it back in 1977.
In 1965 he married Judy Denman. She survives him as does their daughter.