Deryn Watson

"15th January 2026 saw the funeral of Professor Deryn Watson at St Paul's Church, Clapham. Deryn was Professor Emerita in the School of Education, Communication and Society (ECS), a longstanding member of staff, and Head of Department from 2000 to 2004. ECS was represented at the funeral by the current Head of School, Professor Liviu Matei and other colleagues.

Professor Watson was a leading figure in the field of IT and Education, including as a senior member of the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) and an Editor-in-Chief of its journal Education and Information Technologies.

Deryn studied Geography and Anthropology at Girton College, Cambridge and thought of herself as first and always a geographer. For her, geography was one door into countless professional and personal passions such as international relations and travel, history and literature, and she took a continuing interest in the effects of landscapes on settlements and cultures, which included a very practical interest in sources of good food and wine.

Wales was very much in Deryn's blood. So too, in one sense, was Farnborough. Her father, Sir Morien Morgan, a distinguished aeronautical engineer, sometimes dubbed the 'Father of Concorde', worked at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough for many years, latterly as its Director, and it was at the RAE in the mid 1960s that Deryn gained her first computer-related experience, entering data from wind tunnel trials by punching cards for its room-sized mainframe computer. At that stage the place of computers in education and research settings was very circumscribed - to higher education contexts, specialised settings and largely mathematical purposes. Deryn's subsequent career and research saw all that change.

In the 1960s and 70s Deryn taught geography at Haberdashers' Aske's School, Acton and Mayfield School in Putney. She is remembered by former school students as an inspirational teacher whose infectious love for her subject shaped their own subsequent trajectories at university and work. It was this dedicated grounding in the practices of teaching and learning that enabled Deryn to become one of a group of pioneers working in the 1980s on computer assisted learning as part of the 'Computers in the Curriculum' Project.

Computers in the Curriculum (CIC) came out of Chelsea College but, after the merger, was based at King's, under the overall direction at that time of Professor Margaret Cox. It was a large and highly ambitious project sitting within national networks, with multiple regional hubs and working across the whole curriculum. Whilst taking a particular interest in supporting the development of geography-related software, Deryn was Director of Humanities and Social Sciences activities. The work was extremely challenging, because everything was new and rapidly evolving – at first hardware and software were hard to come by and there were many competing ideas about what was educationally possible and desirable. But there is no doubt that CIC played a very significant role in shaping both the development and the understanding of the potential contribution of IT in schools. Margaret Cox credits Deryn, especially her vision and unwavering enthusiasm, as having played a major role in this success.

Deryn took a particular interest in articulating and addressing dilemmas that arise when trying to balance a focus on learning and learners with the emerging affordances and constraints of educational computing. By the early 1990's Deryn was publishing work

demonstrating the impact of IT on children's learning and by the early 2000s her work helped map the widespread availability and networking of IT, and increasingly IT-rich learning environments, globally. Over this period, serving as Chair of IFIP's working group on Informatics and ICT in Secondary Education, and a member of its Technical Committee on Education, Deryn mentored many early career research colleagues and cemented her own place as an international research leader in the field.

Although relishing the intellectual aspects of research and academic life, Deryn interpreted her role broadly. She valued an ongoing connection to Girton, working with Marilyn Strathern on a workshop on work-life balance and co-editing a collection on the role of Girtonians during and between the World Wars. More broadly she was a strong advocate for gender equality - and other forms of inclusion - in the academy, before these agendas became embedded in official institutional aspirations.

As a proud resident of Clapham ‘Old Town' Deryn was an active member of the Clapham Society and - fittingly - the Society's committee member with responsibility for 'Common and Open Spaces'. Her love of gardening and garden design informed her support for Clapham's Eden Nature Garden. With a talent for hospitality, Deryn welcomed colleagues, including IFIP colleagues from across the world, into her home. This was a talent that she also exercised as Head of Department, paying attention not only to academic matters, but also to ensuring that carpets were renewed, that there were paintings hanging in the corridors, that there was wine with which to celebrate and that there was broad-ranging conversation to foster and enjoy. In and beyond King's School of Education Deryn brought much to our collective table."

(Copied from https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/professor-deryn-watson-remembering-an-educational-pioneer-and-leader Sunday 1 March 2026)