Background
The younger son of Ernest Darwin Simon, 1st Baron Simon of Wythenshawe and Shena, Lady Simon, he was the brother of the second Baron Simon of Wythenshawe, Roger Simon, the solicitor and writer on Gramsci.
The younger son of Ernest Darwin Simon, 1st Baron Simon of Wythenshawe and Shena, Lady Simon, he was the brother of the second Baron Simon of Wythenshawe, Roger Simon, the solicitor and writer on Gramsci.
Trinity College.
After Gresham"s School, Holt, Norfolk, where he was a contemporary of Benjamin Britten and Donald Maclean, and two terms at Schule Schloss Salem, under the headship of Kurt Hahn, Simon went up to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1934, becoming a leader of the University Education Society. After Cambridge he went to the University of London"s Institute of Education to train as a teacher. In 1938, he was appointed to the newly formed Labour Party education advisory committee and was elected secretary of the National Union of Students branch at the Institute of Education, becoming president in 1939.
He travelled to international student conferences, one such being with Guy Burgess in Moscow in the summer of 1939.
After the war, Simon taught in a Manchester elementary school, then at Varna Street Secondary Modern, and for three years at Salford Grammar School, where he produced a play which gave Albert Finney his first stage role. From 1950 to 1980 Simon taught at the University of Leicester, as a lecturer, then reader (1964), professor (1966), and emeritus professor (1980).
He emerged as a major figure in the world of education, writing on the history and politics of education and advocating comprehensive schools. On 12 February 1941 Brian Simon married Joan Peel, assistant editor of the Times Educational Supplement, the daughter of Home Peel, a civil servant in the India Office.
They had two sons, Alan (born 1943) and Martin (born 1944).
Simon, Brian (1915–2002), educationist and historian by Roy Lowe in Oxford Dictionary of National.