Michael Marland was an inspiring head teacher, an influential educationist and a passionate advocate of comprehensive schooling.

In all he said and wrote, he reminded society that schools are about people, not systems, and that teachers have more influence than they sometimes realise to shape the lives of young people irrespective of their background, class or faith.

Marland was first a teacher, then head teacher of Woodberry Down School in northeast London, 1971-79. But his greatest achievement was as the founding head teacher, 1980-99, of the ambitious three-site North Westminster Community School, where his blend of bow-tied charm, erudition and irrepressible enthusiasm for language, for the arts and for ideas would entice famous figures to come and share their thoughts and performances with students and staff. Keith Waterhouse, Margaret Drabble and Fay Weldon talked about writing to the pupils, and Jessye Norman and Willard White sang for them.

Marland influenced British education deeply. His best known work was The Craft of the Classroom: A Survival Guide to Classroom Management in the Secondary School, first published in 1975 and reissued in 2003 for a new generation of teachers. Its surface air of reassuring practicality — a supreme dissection of the conventions and routines that underpin good classroom management — hides an underlying toughness. If a would-be teacher finds the notion of “control” repugnant, wrote Marland, “he should reconsider his profession.” Good classroom management is not optional: it is central to becoming a good teacher and, in turn, one can be “more subtle, more friendly and more yourself”.

For 40 years, as the changing fads of curriculum and education policy washed over schools, Marland’s focus remained on helping society to see what good schools do. He knew educational law backwards. Indeed, in his wallet he carried a tiny typed paragraph from the Education Reform Act and would brandish it at key moments in discussions about the need for a broad, interlinked curriculum. In the mid-1970s he shaped the concept of pastoral care: the very term “pastoral” (Marland knew that words mattered very much) helped to define the role of the tutor as someone who takes charge of pupils, shepherding them, knowing when to intervene and when to step back. “The central task of the school,” he wrote, “must be sensitive, warm, efficient, human, realistic and thorough” (Pastoral Care, 1974).

As a member from 1972 until 1975 of the Bullock committee on the teaching of English, he began the process of reclaiming language study as an integral part of the English curriculum some years after the teaching of grammar appeared to have fallen out of fashion. His columns in The Guardian and the TES emphasised that a teacher’s role was to help students to make links across subjects: good curriculum design wasn’t about narrow compartmentalisation but vibrant connections. He wanted young people to know about their own culture — local architecture was a particular interest — as well as cultures beyond their own.

He was a committed internationalist who was in demand as a speaker worldwide. He was delighted to serve as part of the Commonwealth Institute Education Committee since the 1980s and made a major contribution to multicultural life as part of Westminster Arts Council and as vice-chair of the City of Westminster Race Equality Council.

Marland was a prolific writer and he influenced the nature of reading within the English curriculum. His ground-breaking anthologies of short stories — Longman Imprint Books — brought a new grittiness to classroom reading, introducing young people to the writings of such as Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow and Keith Waterhouse.

Marland was a painstaking editor, generous with his time for contributors, fascinated by ideas that would tumble forth (“well, that’s very interesting,” he would say, “and it reminds me of something I once read . . .”). His holidays were mostly spent working on publishing projects in his sprawling farmhouse near Walsham le Willows in Suffolk. His study was always awash with books and papers and proofs.

Marland was born in 1934 in London, the son of a pianist with the bandleader Henry Hall, and was educated at Christ’s Hospital School in Horsham, Sussex, and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he read English and history. He taught English first at Abbey Wood School and then Crown Woods School, both in southeast London, and then at Woodberry Down for nine years.

He was founder chairman of the Association for Pastoral Care in Education and also of the Royal Opera House Education Committee. He also served as chairman of the Books in Curriculum research project and was on the steering committee of the National Textbook Reference Library. He was appointed CBE in 1977.

Marland was a passionate believer that education was a major force for good, and that, regardless of race, belief, social background or attitude, education helps us to understand ourselves and each other. Education, he said, isn’t about systems and strategies and structures. His craft was the classroom, but his passion was people and unlocking their potential.

His first wife, Eileen, died in 1968, a second marriage was dissolved, and he is survived by his third wife, Linda, and by four of his five sons and a daughter.

Michael Marland, CBE, head teacher and educationist, was born on December 28, 1934. He died of cancer on July 3, 2008, aged 73