His paper played a key part in shifting aid-supported education programmes away from secondary and higher education towards the primary level – a shift undertaken by the World Bank, the Department for International Development (DFID) and other donor governments over the following years. This helped set the stage for the first global UN Education for All Conference, held in Jomtien, Thailand, in 1990, at which 155 governments and supporting NGOs made commitments for expanding primary education, so that all girls and boys would have one.
Christopher’s strategy paper for the conference, co-authored with Keith Lewin and published in 1993 as Educating All the Children: Strategies for Primary Schooling in the South, documented the practical possibilities of achieving universal primary provision, even in poorer countries with severe budgetary constraints.
Between 1993 and 2000, he undertook a long-term policy advisory role in South Africa. Working initially with the ANC until transition, and then with the new post-apartheid ministry, he helped design a new framework for education, moving from a system with excessive expenditure allocated to the schooling of white children to one of equal subsidies for all. The essential features of this new school financing policy are retained to this day.
In 2002 he was appointed by Unesco as founding director of the Education for All global monitoring report. Education was by then high on the agenda of international development. In 2000, world leaders had pledged at a conference in Dakar in 1995, and as part of the millenium development goals in 2000, to provide education for all, with gender equality, by 2015. The global monitoring report became the main instrument for holding governments and agencies to account for the commitments they had made. The findings of Education for All: Is the World on Track? received front-page treatment in the press of some 160 countries.
In part, this outreach was the result of Christopher insisting that the report be free of jargon and UN bureaucratic censorship, negotiating right up to Unesco’s director-general that he alone should be responsible for its content and conclusions. The next two global reports – Gender and Education for All: The Leap to Equality (2003) and Education for All: The Quality Imperative (2004) – were equally bold.
In 2005 Christopher was appointed professor of the economics of education at Cambridge University, and director of a new research centre for Commonwealth education. At the core of this was a research consortium on education outcomes and poverty. His own contribution had a significant influence on DfID aid policy between 2008 and 2013. He provided the technical analysis and the evidence base for a substantial increase in UK aid for education. A 10-year pledge to provide £8.5bn to support education, announced by the then chancellor, Gordon Brown, and the secretary of state for international development, Hilary Benn, in 2006, was described by Benn as “DfID at its best”.
Christopher’s writings set education within the broader context of wages and employment, incomes policy, human resources planning, public sector pay and alternatives to structural economic adjustment. States or Markets? (1991) attracted attention towards the end of the Thatcher era, arguing that for practical policy the choice should never be state or market but a more judicious balancing of each, requiring careful analysis in relation to country and context.
Born in Glossop, Derbyshire, Christopher was the son of Frederick, a primary school headteacher, and his wife, Margaret (nee McMellon), a music teacher, pianist and organist. From Chetham’s school, Manchester, he went to Bristol University, where he studied economics and philosophy, and won the Powesland memorial prize in economics. He later gained gain a diploma in development economics and a doctorate at Cambridge University. After working in Botswana in the Ministry of Finance and Development (1971-75), he was appointed a fellow at the Institute of Development Studies of Sussex University, where he became a professorial fellow in 1994.
Tall, with piercing blue eyes and an open friendly manner, Christopher was known for being warm and collegial, supportive of students and an authoritative chair and leader of debates. He combined intellectual acuity with a deep humanity in his continual advocacy of the need for education for all the world’s children. He was both a talented pianist and cellist.
[“Source-theguardian”]
