JANA KODICEK taught generations of Cambridge children in her ramshackle house, sharing lessons with up to 20 field-spaniels, geese and the odd goat. Part treasure trove, part farmyard, her home was a haven in which children discovered learning, and new confidence.

Jana Kodicek came from a family of Prague scientists. Her Jewish father, Egon, was a renowned nutrition scientist who later worked in the World Health Organisation. Her Catholic mother, Jindra, was an ophthalmologist.

Egon was in Cambridge when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia. They detained and tortured Jindra, to find out where her husband was, but she did not talk. The Nazis threatened that they would not let her go unless she agreed to divorce him. Jindra had to agree.

Using false X-rays, Jindra later persuaded the Nazis to let her take her child Jana to Italy for treatment for an alleged bone disease. From there, mother and daughter managed to get on to the last boat to leave and reached Cambridge with nothing but a single suitcase. Reunited, Kodicek’s parents remarried. Despite difficult circumstances, their new home became an open house to refugees from mainland Europe. Kodicek grew up hearing heart-wrenching stories of families torn apart. Her father’s mother did not get out of Czechoslovakia; Jana’s photograph was pasted above her bunk in the concentration camp where she died.

After being head girl at St Mary’s School, Kodicek studied medicine in London, but changed to biology, to be able to look after her mother who was seriously ill. She became a science teacher in Cambridge, then a private tutor.

She never married, devoting herself to her pupils and her animals. Her home in Fulbrooke Road was crammed full of her life’s interests, as she never threw anything out. She applied the same creative scientific method to changing children’s minds as her parents had in curing medical conditions. Seven days a week, 12 hours a day, for decades, a stream of young children came to her unusual home for the most astonishing tutorials. Some were the children of ambitious parents who wanted their child to fulfil its potential. Others were pupils of conventional schools who did not fit in and were seen as failing educationally. Many were classed as having educational special needs. Every one of these children became Kodicek’s project, to bring out their natural gifts. And she succeeded, time and time again.

Kodicek knew that to unlock a child’s desire to learn, you had to pour many hours per week into just one child, understand how he or she thought and tailor the teaching method to that individual child. She started with the premise that no child is ineducable, and that if one went backwards to identify which conceptual building blocks had been insufficiently mastered, one could establish a firm foundation for learning.

She transformed children who were considered difficult, she brought children up from the level of disability to ability, she patiently sat with her pupils in the crowded living room that was her teaching room, with many dogs wandering in and out. She greeted each child with an enormous hug, a warm embrace, and told each of them that they were her special person, making them feel that this grandmother of a figure cared just for them. She restored self-esteem to children who had only ever experienced being bottom of the class. She fired up their imaginations, interweaving milking her goats and collecting freshly laid eggs with learning their tables and writing stories.

Hundreds of Cambridge children and young adults owe their educational outcome to the charismatic, endlessly generous Kodicek. In the past few months, when her health failed her, she lay in hospital with her child pupils visiting and thought only to ask them about their lives, what games they were playing, how their friends were, and how much she was looking forward to hearing them read their latest work to her. Children who at school were square peg s in round holes found in Jana’s living room a perfect fit between their mind and that of their teacher. She adapted to them.

She is survived by her mother and her sister.

Jana Kodicek, tutor, was born on May 4, 1937. She died on June 17, 2004, aged 67.