My former colleague Richard Garner, who has died of cancer aged 69, spent four decades covering education as a specialist correspondent, first at the Birmingham Mail, then the Times Educational Supplement (now TES), where he became news editor, followed by 12 years as correspondent for the Daily Mirror and 15 as education editor of the Independent.

He never lost his enthusiasm for the subject and was not only the doyen of education journalists but also the longest serving specialist correspondent.

Richard, whom I knew when I was his opposite number first at the Daily Mail and then the Guardian, was not only a highly professional reporter but also renowned within the education world for his integrity and genial, unassuming manner – and, it has to be said, the dress sense of a supply teacher at the end of a gruelling week.

Colleagues appreciated his readiness to help less knowledgable rivals, drowning in the alphabet soup of acronyms and the labyrinthine complexity of schools politics.

The son of Eric Garner, who owned clothing shops in north London, and his wife, Dorothy (nee Taylor), Richard was educated at Highgate school, where he was in the same class as the future Labour education secretary Charles Clarke. Richard did not go to university, opting instead to train as a journalist at Harlow Technical College (now Harlow College), Essex. Years later, he persuaded his employers at the Mirror to run regular vocational education pages.

Richard began his career in 1969, working on the Islington Gazette and as a part-time hospital radio disc jockey, though his career led him not to Radio 1, as he had hoped, but the Kent Evening Post. In 1977 he moved to the Birmingham Mail, before joining the TES for eight years, where, as news editor, he was responsible for offering jobs to a number of journalists who would become national education correspondents, including the Guardian’s James Meikle.

Richard covered all the main twists of education politics, including the strikes and reforms of the 1980s and 90s and the evolution of schools management and funding that followed. He was trusted both by teacher unions and politicians.

In her tribute to him, the former education secretary Estelle Morris wrote: “He was guided by honesty and commitment. I always saw him as a fellow educationist. I knew he cared about what he wrote.”

Following his retirement in 2016, when the Independent ceased its print publication, Richard launched a career as a thriller writer, publishing three novels.

His passion outside education was cricket. He followed England home Tests and tours around the world. His last afternoon in a Hertfordshire hospice would have been brightened by England’s victory in the fourth Test against South Africa.

Richard was married three times: to Sarah Fuller in the 70s, to Anne Wilkinson from 1985 until she died in 2008, and to Barbara Hopkin, whom he wed a fortnight before his death. She and his older brother, Graham, survive him.