Throughout her working life, Hazel Bines, who has died suddenly of heart failure at the age of 59, worked to promote the reforms that would make schools more inclusive and improve the educational opportunities for all disadvantaged children. Her career mirrors many of the developments of thinking in special and inclusive education that have taken place in Britain since the late 1970s and early 80s.
Her first book, Redefining Remedial Education, published in 1986, marked the change from the concept of remedial education to special educational needs and inclusion. She was an "inclusion warrior" and, later, on the international stage, she applied the lessons learned from her career in Britain to other countries. Equally, she considered the relevance of lessons learned away from home to the UK, which she saw as increasingly in need of them. At the time of her death she was consultant to a number of NGOs working to promote greater access to education for girls and disabled children in developing countries.
Hazel was born in Brighton, the eldest daughter of Ted and Connie French, radical political activists from whom she inherited a passion for social justice. After gaining a scholarship to Brighton high school for girls, she went, in 1967, to study sociology at the London School of Economics. As a student radical in the 1960s, she was memorably sent down for defending her right to confront injustice.
In 1970 she went to Sheffield to train as a primary teacher and worked there as a class teacher. She went on to teach history, geography and social studies in a comprehensive, where her interest in working with pupils with learning and behaviour difficulties took her into special education. Her master's thesis from the University of Sheffield, written in the mid-1970s while working with juvenile delinquents, was a ground-breaking study of an assessment centre for young offenders carried out by someone who actually taught in one.
It was recognised at the time as one of the most authentic accounts of life in such an establishment, reflecting all the characteristics of her later work: intellectual rigour, a broad knowledge of context and an allegiance to ideals combined with a sense of what was possible from a practical point of view.
Beginning in 1983, she used a Talbot studentship in the department of Education at Oxford University to complete a doctorate on the redefinition of remedial education. In 1986 she entered teacher education as a senior lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, becoming deputy head of the school of education before moving on to become a professor and head of teacher education at the University of Northumbria.
In 1999, Hazel switched careers and joined the Department for International Development as a senior education adviser in Pakistan. A transfer to Ethiopia in 2003 introduced her to Africa, before her return to Britain and the life of a consultant. Immediately before her death she had just returned from a visit to Mozambique, on behalf of Sightsavers, where she was working to ensure a quality education was available to blind and visually impaired children in Africa.
Hazel carried out key research on the inclusion of disabled children in education for World Vision UK. This was presented at the World Bank in October 2007 and helped to formulate an "inclusion" framework for the national education plans of 30 developing countries. In September this year, she had begun a final evaluation of the Commonwealth Education Fund, a project jointly run by ActionAid, Save the Children and Oxfam.
Hazel was also a dedicated mountaineer. From time spent in the Peak District as a ranger to journeys in the Himalayas, through to her last trip traversing the Pyrenees this summer, the combination of space, calm and physical challenge reinvigorated Hazel for the mental and social demands of her work.
With her partner, Steve, she visited many of the remotest places on Earth; yet it was always the people she met that Hazel would talk about on her return. She had planned to make her writing more personal as she reduced her work commitments and was recently named as a runner-up in a writing competition with a piece that featured her local Pennine landscape .
Hazel's life-affirming approach was reflected within her personal and family relationships, where her enthusiasm, combined with so much experience, made her a natural mentor to those closest to her, particularly her nieces. Her wide-ranging body of scholarly work covered special needs, school leadership and educational issues in the developing world. Its hallmark was her determined engagement with difficult ideas, and their application in a troubled, complex, but always hopeful world.
She is survived by Steve.
• Hazel Bines, educationist, born May 25 1949; died October 27 2008