Elinor Goldschmied

Early life Elinor Violet Sinnott was born to a middle-class family in rural Gloucestershire on 15 December 1910. Goldschmied's brother died when she was eight years old and the death of her mother followed shortly afterwards. At age 12, Elinor (and her elder sister) left the family home to live with their grandfather in Bristol, where she was educated at the Clifton High School in Bristol and she subsequently became head girl. There, she made the decision to enter into a career in education and trained to be a nursery teacher at the Froebel College in Roehampton. Goldschmied took part in left-wing causes while she was at the university and was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. the latter group with whom she worked with were between the ages of two and four and all were deemed "unbilletable" because of poor behaviour. It led to the introduction of "heuristic play" to promote a relaxed form of play for babies under the age of two and for maintaining a special relationship with an individual member of staff; The ideas were published in the 1994 book People Under Three: Children in Daycare, which she co-authored with Sonia Jackson. From 1978 to 1998, she visited Italy three times per year as a consultant. Goldschmied also performed consultancy roles in the London boroughs of Hammersmith, Fulham, and Islington as well as in the Spanish community of Catalonia. She died on 27 February 2009 and was buried on the western side of Highgate Cemetery in North London. ==Personality==