A PIONEER in education and care for children with autism in the county has died aged 94.

Dr Mercy Heatley, from Old Marston, was a paediatric psychiatrist for Oxfordshire County Council before she pioneered the idea of integrating children with autism into the classroom in the 1970s.

Through her work she had realised the needs of autistic children were not being met and her practice was adopted nationally after being recommended in the Warnock Report into special educational needs in 1978.

She also helped to found the charity Children in Touch, which pays for additional therapies for autistic children, and set up an autistic unit at Lord Williams' School in Thame.

More recently the charity has established units at St Nicholas Primary School in Old Marston and at The Cherwell School.

She made national news in 2002 when she withheld part of her income tax in protest against the Iraq War and was summoned before magistrates.

Her eldest daughter Rose said she was "caring" towards her family and friends and retained her "sharp wit and good sense of humour" up to her death on September 5.

Mercy Heatley was born in October 1, 1921, in Northern Ireland to parents Geoffrey and Irene Bing who founded a boarding school for young boys – Rockport – in 1906.

The school is now co-educational but at the time Mercy was one of only four girls and she moved to Howell's, a girl's boarding school in Wales, at the age of 12 and then onto Somerville College, Oxford in 1939.

Her older brother was Geoffrey Bing, a barrister and Labour MP for Hornchurch between 1945 and 1955.

The radical QC, who died in 1977, was also educated at Rockport School before getting a place at Lincoln College, Oxford.

Her history studies at Oxford were interrupted by the Second World War when she joined the war effort driving lorries in the Auxiliary Territorial Service.

Following this experience she intended to study psychology and become a probation officer but changed her mind, opting to go into medicine and psychiatry.

It was during her studies that she met her future husband Dr Norman Heatley at a Somerville dance.

The pair married six months later in December 1944 and had five children together.

Dr Heatley, 10 years her senior, was a scientist and a member of the Oxford team who developed penicillin and enabled its use to treat Allied troops during the war.

Her daughter Rose said it "irked" her mother that it was Sir Alexander Fleming who tended to get all the credit for the "miracle drug" and she always did her best to put the record straight.

The couple lived in Oxford Road in Old Marston for 70 years; Norman died in 2004.

After her retirement from Oxfordshire County Council's social services department she worked to assess family problems in court hearings well into her 80s and remained a trustee for charity Children in Touch until stepping down in 2009.

She moved into St Luke's Hospital – a care home in Headington – in 2014 where she died peacefully in her sleep earlier this month.

She is survived by two sons, Jonathan and Christopher and two daughters Rose and Tamsin and six grandchildren Nicholas, Robert and Edward Heatley and Oscar, Vita and Daisy Oldershaw.

Her third child Piers died when he was three.