Michael Young, who died this week at the age of 86, was an energetic and innovative social reformer whose work in education was influential. He was a major force behind the demise of the 11-plus.

His numerous achievements included founding the Open University and the Consumers’ Association, which was followed by the Advisory Centre for Education and its magazine Where? for parents of schoolchildren.

Having spent his early education being shuffled from one school to another suffering under a series of sadistic masters, he was sent in 1929 to the recently founded Dartington Hall in Devon. The school’s philosophy that all children are born gifted and need only to be nurtured for those gifts to bloom, had a great influence on him. “Every child is a precious individual,” he said, adding that “schools should be devoted to encouraging all the human talents”.

His satirical history of British society The Rise of the Meritocracy, published in 1958, did much to persuade educationists that the 11-plus should be abolished. He argued that a grammar-school system - based on IQ, which could never be improved, was more divisive than a class system - where at least one might rise through increasing one’s wealth.

At the 40th birthday party of ACE in 2000 he said selection was still as important an issue as ever, describing it as “the bit of education which most bolsters the inequality which is the curse of our society”.

Susan Rees of ACE said: “Michael Young has done more than anyone to give parents the information and confidence they need to enable them to play an active role in their children’s education.”

Other initiatives of his included The University of the Third Age (1982) and The National Association for the Education of Sick Children (1993). But his most memorable contribution to education was the Open University, which accepted its first students in 1969. Professor Brenda Gourley, the OU’s vice-chancellor, said: “Lord Young was a true visionary, an innovator and creative thinker.”

Five years earlier, Young had set up the prototype, the National Extension College in Cambridge, to serve “people who have slipped through the rungs of the conventional education system”.

Young was made a life peer in 1978 by James Callaghan but later left the Labour party for the SDP, becoming its education spokesman in the House of Lords. He returned to Labour in 1989.

Caroline Hendrie