This is such a sad task and one that needs to be undertaken far, far too soon.  It's also one that could take a long time given how Tom enriched our lives as colleague and friend in the Education Studies team at LondonMet.  Having witnessed how fundamental Tom's mission to educate and champion education was, it's perhaps not surprising that he relished opportunities to encourage and inspire many students who were first in their family to embark on university and were tentatively dipping toes into the stream.  Tom never disappointed and entered into the task with aplomb, throwing his whole self into enabling students to imagine, question, and interrogate ideas - not least, slipshod cliches.  His pedagogy was a kind of performance art in which there was little option other than to pay complete attention because you never quite knew quite what was about to be said, done or conjured up in lecture rooms where students and Tom co-created a synthesis of imagination, life-experience, and criticality that was at the heart of his teaching and learning philosophy and stands forever in the many books and papers he authored with Sandra. 

It was my privilege, with his dear friend and co-author Sandra Abegglen, to gain some insight into the source of Tom's philosophy and understand how deep it ran when we invited him to talk to the students about his work as an adventure play pioneer as a young man in Hainault.  As a teenager Tom had been a prime mover in setting up an adventure playground on derelict land where children were enabled and encouraged to play and construct worlds of imagination using waste materials that Tom had cajoled local builders into supplying.  They certainly had fun and by taking risks and testing their physical, linguistic, and social limits they could build relations with others and learn about themselves.  He spoke with humour and candour about the challenging incidents he (as a teenager himself) had to address, as well as with a passionate regret that such a scheme would be almost inconceivable now.  As Tom recounted his experience to a rapt group of students and knowing that this was an opportunity not to be missed, Sandra A. took 'minutes' that could be written up and in time these were published in three parts for an online newsletter journal entitled 'The Child in the City' - I guess it is still available.  I had been musing on this just a few days before the sad news came through that Tom had died; then realised that despite being just one chapter in Tom's extraordinary life it said so much about him and the things he devoted himself to - it is so perfectly Tom and underlines how profoundly he is missed.  David