Obituary: Alan Small, inspired teacher who set new standards in community work Published on Saturday 28 April 2012 17:13 Born: 9 May, 1937, in Kilmarnock. Died: 6 April, 2012, in Edinburgh, aged 74 ALAN Small was a creative thinker, teacher, and a passionate proponent of youth and community work. The third child of Jean and Leonard Small, one of Scotland's most charismatic preachers, Alan and his siblings grew up in manses while Leonard was minister of West High, Kilmarnock, Cramond, and finally St Cuthbert's Parish Church in Edinburgh. He gained a Master of Arts degree from the University of Edinburgh and looked set to follow his father into the ministry. After studying Divinity, a brief spell as an assistant minister followed but he found the best way to express his gifts lay beyond the pulpit. Alan was conspicuous among a number of clergy who shifted direction towards education and social work, and whose relationship with the Church became sceptical rather than devotional. In the early 1960s, Alan and his first wife Moira moved to Aberdeen. Two years at St Katherine's Club and Community Centre (now the Lemon Tree) seeded a lifelong interest in how to relate to vulnerable young people. After gaining a diploma in education from Moray House, they returned to Aberdeen where Alan taught at Summerhill Secondary. Regarded as an exceptional teacher, he avoided the pitfall of talking at the class and instead honed the skill of involving pupils in lessons by asking orchestrated and highly searching questions. It was an approach that won their interest and which his children came to know well. In 1967 Alan and Moira left Aberdeen for Atlanta, Georgia, where Alan taught English at Westminster Middle School. The following spring Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. Alan later described walking in the 90-degree heat of Atlanta as part of the funeral march for Dr King, joining other mourners in the hymn I'm Not Ashamed To Own My Lord. His experiences in America had a profound effect on Alan's attitudes to education, young people and politics. Back in Edinburgh, Alan taught community and social work at Moray House, thriving alongside a generation of influential and intellectually generous colleagues. From 1972, he was an Inspector of Informal Further Education at the Scottish Office. His time as an HMI was defined by creativity and a commitment to social justice. Once, he inspected a local community centre in a Glasgow housing estate. After reviewing the entire programme, his report focused on the deficiencies of the centre's toilets. From this he developed a wider critique of the management, saying that the state of the toilets symbolised their utter lack of respect for the people of the scheme. The report was typical of his thinking - and the centre was never the same again. His outstanding skills lay in communicating with young people and those working with them. Partly this came from a belief that the talents of many disadvantaged young people were being wasted. But it also stemmed from anger that schools and politicians had failed them. His ability to cross the bridges between be-suited inspector and young people, sometimes in testing circumstances, meant that he could bring daylight into a discussion with senior staff like few others. Identifying where power lay in any situation, which was not necessarily obvious, was always a starting point; he spent so much time committed to those who lacked it. He would give short shrift to anyone who could carelessly criticise the powerless without bothering to understand their reality. He was interested in the distribution of wealth and power and viewed community work as a means of making a real difference. Alan played a major role in producing the first significant national report by HMI on Youth Work in Scotland. It captured and conveyed his specific talent for listening, and for being open and non-judgmental with young people. In 1987 Alan remarried, to Mary, and their daughter Lucy was born in 1992. For the past 22 years Alan has been a highly distinctive, well-liked and vibrant figure within the Inverleith community of Edinburgh. On retirement, Alan worked as a consultant with an array of voluntary sector organisations, including national youth agency Young Scot, and drugs education charity Fast Forward. In 2008 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the National Youth Worker of the Year Awards. Outwith work, Alan had an enduring love affair with the island of Iona. He would be at his happiest every summer on the sound of Iona in the Tern, the clinker-built boat gifted to his father. His homes were loud, sociable and nurturing spaces where religion, education, and politics could be debated with seriousness and much laughter. He is survived by Mary, his children Steven, Patrick, Mike, Chris and Lucy, seven grandchildren, his brother Ron and his sister Catriona. His brother Colin died in January. Alan's abundant humour, quality of insight and his remarkable gift for language will be remembered with great fondness by his friends.