History of the OU

Pedagogic innovator and first Dean of Social Sciences at the Open University.
In 1968, aged 33, Michael Drake was appointed as Dean of Social Sciences at the newly created University of the Air, Open University, where he worked for most of academic career. Central to his contribution was his assiduous promotion of independent research at all levels. He developed a problem-based learning approach enabling adults to be supported to contextualise local research by employing small-scale social scientific research skills, notably identifying aims, hypothesising and using theoretical models.
Born in Batley, the only son of Frank and Florence Drake, Michael recalled a ‘bookish environment’ at home. His father, a graduate of Leeds University, was a primary school teacher in an industrial town, Birstall, Yorkshire. Michael attended Batley Grammar School, won a state scholarship to Cambridge, where he was awarded a 2:1 in History and subsequently a PhD. His work with Cambridge Group for the History of Population & Social Structure provided early experience of working within the academy with independent scholars. He applied aggregative analysis to all the parish registers in his classic study of half-a-million baptism, marriage and burial records of Agbrigg and Morley Wapentakes in south Yorkshire. His conclusions were published in the Economic History Review. In addition to volunteers collecting church records his first wife, Randi Bull, to whom he was married for 16 years, helped with the collation of data. Michael subsequently adapted the co-operative research model. Academics were to be on tap, but not on top and there was to be greater acknowledgment of how knowledge could be built through collaborative engagement which utilised scholarly volunteers’ experiences.
Michael’s determination to ensure that learners were not treated as intellectual hod carriers extended to an encouragement of student critique. After teaching at universities in Dublin (and in 1963 publishing on his local research ‘Marriage and Population Growth in Ireland, I750-1845′) Belfast and Wisconsin during the 1960s, he got a post at Kent, where to the chagrin of some of his colleagues he collated data on teaching based on students response to questionnaires. He also organised undergraduate independent research projects and interdisciplinary courses with booklets summarising lectures and with advice on how to write essays.
While still formally employed at Kent, he started to work for the Open University, which was based in London. He soon committed to the latter employer and oversaw the appointment of OU staff and the production of teaching material. Modules were classified by the initial letter of the faculty but, rather than opt for SS (Social Sciences), the letter D for Drake was adopted and remains in use. Michael was heavily involved in the production of a project module, Historical Data and Social Sciences. It attracted around 500 students for each presentation and included newsletters encouraging contributions and stamped postcards addressed to Michael Drake for students to complete and post to him.
His commitment to ensuring that high standard teaching materials reached students was such that he rewrote the Geography sections of the introductory course for social scientists, persuaded the wives of faculty members to help pack correspondence materials for dispatch to the first students and, when a row arose over a BBC producer’s objection to the colour of Politics lecturer’s shirt he drove from Milton Keynes to Alexandra Palace to resolve the matter.
Michael continued to use computers in his research into population changes in the long nineteenth century. In 1969 he published Population and Society in Norway 1735–1865. After ensuring that future Deans would be elected he resigned from his post as Dean in 1972, though later was elected to the role for a further term. He was responsible for devising and almost single-handedly writing Historical Sources and the Social Scientist, D301, presented 1974–1988. One of its distinctive features was the emphasis placed on testing general theories about historical change by reference to local sources and on enabling students to engage in ‘explorations of the past undertaken for the explicit purpose of advancing social scientific enquiry’. Local population studies figured prominently and the journal Local Population Studies (which Michael co-edited from 1979) was distributed to students as part of the teaching materialsDespite the frantic pace required for the production of teaching materials in the first years of the OU, and the responsibility of running a vast faculty with students and staff who were based across Europe and beyond, in 1980, by translating and introducing Norwegian sociologist Eilert Sundt’ On Marriage in Norway, Michael was instrumental in bringing to the text to the attention of an international audience. In 1981 he was selected to become a member of the prestigious Det Norse Videnskaps-Akademi, Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. In the early 1990s he left the UK to teach in Tromsø, but returned to the OU after his third wife, Anne, complained of the dark, cold, isolation of life in the far north of Norway.
For Family and Community History: 19th and 20th centuries, DA301, 1994-2001 students wrote short theses about local history based on primary sources. Their results were collated on CDs, which were issued to subsequent students. By the final course presentation there were hundreds of earlier studies to which students could refer. Subsequently the students’ reports were made available more widely. Michael was a part of a team which ensured that these creators of historical knowledge were doing far more than carrying bricks for academics.
Michael Drake was instrumental in the creation of an extra-mural initiative: Open Studies in Family and Community History, OSFACH. Through leaflets, newsletters, CDs and conferences it offered guidance and support enabling the production of collaborative local histories. In 1997, with the support of the Wellcome Trust, Drake co-ordinated ‘The decline of infant mortality in England and Wales, 1871-1948: a medical conundrum’. Twenty DA301 graduates collated and manipulated quantitative and qualitative data and submitted their research projects, based on local studies from around the country, for a BPhil, an MPhil or a DPhil. In April 1998 an OSFACH conference launched both the Family and Community Historical Research Society, FACHRS and the journal Family & Community History. Drake became a founder co-editor of this academic journal, and his article for its first edition modelled the use of everyday materials as sources for historians. He remained an enthusiastic but never dominant, activist within FACHRS for many years, providing resources and ideas. He was proud of its successful growth and well-received publications.
There is an irony in the naming in his honour. of Drake Court, an enclosed space on the OU’s Milton Keynes campus, This is because Michael embodied the ideal of the OU Foundation Chancellor who, on opening the OU, proclaimed that the University had no cloisters – a word meaning closed, but that it would flow all over the United Kingdom. Perhaps, in recognition of Michael’s capacity to reach out beyond the physical and administrative structures of the university and construct and maintain networks of independent and institute-based scholars, we should borrow Christopher Wren’s epitaph: ‘Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you’.
Keith Michael Drake,11 January 1935-27 September 2025, is survived by sister, Anne, his former wives, Randi and Jacquie, his sons, Paul and Simon and his stepchildren, Sean, Susan and Shelley Marven.