Caroline St John-Brooks

Dr Caroline St. John-Brooks (24 March 1947 in Oxford – 8 September 2003 in London) was an Anglo-Irish journalist and academic.

She gained a BA in English Literature from Trinity College Dublin, an MA in Education from the University of Ulster at Coleraine, and a PhD in the teaching of English in secondary schools from Bristol University in 1980.After graduation, she worked as an English lecturer for eight years, first in Ireland, where she was also an education writer for the Irish Times, and then at Bristol Polytechnic.

In 1979 she became Education Correspondent for the magazine New Society, and moved to the same position at The Sunday Times in 1987. She became Assistant Editor of the Times Educational Supplement (TES) in 1990.

Between 1994 and 1997 she worked as an education researcher at the OECD in Paris; publications include Schools Under Scrutiny (1995), Mapping the Future: Young People and Career Guidance (1996) and Parents as Partners in Schooling (1997).

She returned to the Times Educational Supplement as Editor in 1997 and remained until 2000, when ill health forced her to resign. In three-and-a-half years she had modernised and expanded the paper, with new magazine sections appealing to the women who now predominated in education. From 2001 until her death she was a Governor of the University of Greenwich. She was also a member of the British-American Project.

She died of breast cancer at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London in September 2003, aged 56.