DAVID ROBINSON spent retirement as a tutor for the Marx Memorial Library. In doing so, he helped transform its teaching, using all his skills as an educator to ensure Marxism was made accessible and, as he said, a tool for understanding that could be used by everyone.  

For Robinson, a key part of this process was the introduction of team teaching in ways that also sought to involve students themselves. And at the same time as drawing on students’ own experience and that of the wider movement, he also saw the Morning Star as an essential educational tool by which to draw on the wider experience of the working-class movement here and internationally.  

Robinson worked all his life as a teacher, starting in a large school in a mining community near Doncaster but then, for 33 years, in Chiltern Edge School, Sonning Common. There, he was encouraged by Roger Smalley to develop educationally innovative approaches. He eventually became head of humanities.  

But Robinson was also an internationalist, teaching in Milan with his partner Isobel in the early 1980s, establishing a link and a teacher exchange with a school in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, in 1994. Recently, he worked with colleagues in Nairobi to develop new online courses in Marxism.  

Robinson was born in 1956 in a working-class area of Newcastle where his father worked in the Swan Hunter shipyard and his mother in the Department of Health and Social Security. He was the first of his family to secure a university degree, a combined honours in history, politics and English at Liverpool University.  

In Oxfordshire, he was for over two decades president of the National Union of Teachers. There he played a leading role in the Save Our Edge campaign, successfully defending his own school from closure, something he described as “my proudest moment as an NUT activist.”

Later, he was influential in working towards a unified teaching union, playing a key role locally in the development of the National Education Union.  

Hank Roberts, organising secretary of Unify, remembers Robinson as “always a strong supporter of bringing education professionals together and supporting the aim of one union for the whole of the education sector.”  

Gawain Little, a former colleague in Oxfordshire NUT-NEU and now general secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions, remembers Robinson’s welcoming and inclusive approach as president of the local branch.  

“Dave had a huge impact on me as a trade unionist, and I remember him welcoming me to my first ever NUT committee meeting. He was always ready to embrace new ideas and was part of the core team that reshaped the branch and, from it, the national union. The trade union movement owes him a debt, as do I.”  

One of his fellow tutors at the Marx Memorial Library, Nina Hilton, highlights his role as a teacher — “always greeting students and comrades with a smile, a friendly hello and usually a joke or two. He brought not just knowledge and teaching skills to every session but also warmth and humour, which made learning and teaching alongside him a pleasure.”