About IRFOL
Michael Young
Personnel
Consultants

MICHAEL YOUNG - LORD YOUNG OF DARTINGTON 1915 - 2002

Michael Young was described as ' Britain 's most brilliant social entrepreneur', and was the author of 'The rise of the meritocracy'. He invented over 50 organisations including the Consumer's Association, and the Open University. In his lecture to the Open University (link MY1.DOC) in 1994, on the occasion of their 25th anniversary, he talked of the need for 'a look-out tower for open learning' and proposed the establishment of a Research Foundation for Open Learning. This proposal led to the establishment of our Foundation, The International Research Foundation for Open Learning (IRFOL).

His ideas of making education open to all, of letting it break out from the limitations of school, college and class, and of constant experiment towards a more just society, provide the bedrock for the work of three organisations, the National Extension College, the International Extension College (IEC), and IRFOL.

He had long been interested in the family and, with Peter Willmott, wrote the classic Family and Kinship in East London in 1957. Influential in designing the welfare state in the 1940s, Lord Young later in life came to believe the state's basic building block should have been the extended, rather than the nuclear family.

Michael Young's papers are held by Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College , Cambridge and have recently been catalogued.

www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/about/Young_conference.shtml

Read The Prosects of Open Learning by Michael Young >> (PDF - 116 KB)

The Michael Young Centre is a campus in a stonemason's yard. Michael Young opened the centre in October 2001. It is owned by the National Extension College (NEC) which was set up in 1963 as a pilot for the Open University and has been running programmes of distance education in Britain since its foundation. It is in Cambridge and lies between the Hills Road Sixth Form College and Homerton College , of the University of Cambridge . When NEC was growing out of its former home, it acquired the site from the stonemasons, Rattee and Kett, who no longer wanted an inner city site, and converted its buildings for people to work in and its remaining stone and industrial machinery to a sculpture garden, for them to sit in. The Centre brings together three non-profit agencies: the National Extension College , the International Extension College (IEC), and (until July 2005) the International Research Foundation for Open Learning (IRFOL).