A SOCIOLOGIST who demonstrated the power of class in shaping educational achievement has died aged 97.

Jean Floud (nee McDonald) first came to Oxford when she became the city’s assistant education officer in 1940.

This gave her an in-depth knowledge of educational administration and, combined with her training in sociology, informed her study of social mobility.

Her book, Social Class and Educational Opportunity, which was published in 1956, demonstrated how much influence class had over educational attainment, and came to be regarded as a classic.

In 1962 she became only the second woman, after Dame Margery Perham, to be awarded a full fellowship at Oxford University’s Nuffield College.

Her interest in academic administration led to her being appointed a member of the Franks Commission of Inquiry into the University of Oxford, which reported in 1966.

The commission removed from the university’s Convocation, which is made up of all its graduates and academics, the last vestiges of its ancient power.

Once the commission’s recommendations were enacted, the only powers left for Convocation were the election of the Chancellor and of the Professor of Poetry, which it holds to this day.

In 1971 she was elected as principal of Newnham College in Cambridge and held that post until her retirement in 1983.

She then returned to Oxford and continued to lecture.

Jean McDonald was born on November 3, 1915 in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex and went to the local grammar school.

Despite not appearing particularly academic at first, she eventually attended the London School of Economics after taking evening classes.

It was there that she met Peter Floud and the couple married in 1938 after they had both joined the Communist Party.

Her time working for the City of Oxford may have been formative for her, but it was when she returned to the LSE in 1947 that she carried out her best-known sociological work.

By this time her husband was working as a keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum, but he died from a brain tumour in 1960, leaving her to raise their three young children.

Away from academia she was involved with the Howard League for Penal Reform in the late 1970s, as part of a working party reviewing the law relating to dangerous offenders.

She was made a CBE in 1976 but declined the offer of a life peerage from the Labour government of the time.

Jean Floud died on March 28 and is survived by two daughters Frances and Esther. Her son, Andrew, predeceased her.