Simpson, Martha Margaret Mildred (1865–1948), Montessori kindergarten teacher and school inspector in Australia, was born 3 May 1865 in Omagh, Co. Tyrone, daughter of George Simpson (occupation unknown) and Mary Simpson (née Wilson). She emigrated (c.1886) to New South Wales, and shortly afterwards took up a position as an ‘unclassified’ teacher with the department of public instruction (October 1886). She was assigned to teach in a small school at Lake Macquarie, moved to Carrow (1887) and to Tea Tree (1890), and received her basic classification when she was appointed to Tea Gardens (1891). She quickly moved up the ladder with regular promotions and was assigned to larger schools in Woerden and Tamworth. In 1906, when placed in charge of the kindergarten department of Blackfriars public school, part of Alexander Mackie's teacher's college, she began to implement her specific teaching philosophies, based mainly from the Froebel method, by removing the fixed school desks and teaching the children while seated on the floor until new desks and chairs arrived. In 1908 she was appointed lecturer at the teacher's college for a new training program for female kindergarten teachers, as her progressive philosophies were in line with Australian educational reformers. In 1909 she published a small volume of kindergarten lessons, Work in the kindergarten, based on the life and customs of the aboriginal people, which advocated Herbartian pedagogical principles of utilising their familiar environment – birds, trees, legends – to teach aboriginal children.
By 1911 word of her unique methods had reached Sydney, and in July of that year the minister of public instruction, A. C. Carmichael, requested that she familiarise herself with the new teaching methods of Dr Maria Montessori as outlined in her recently translated book. Simpson did so and reported that the Montessori method, in conjunction with the other liberal methods currently in use, would be beneficial. In 1912 a pilot programme implementing Montessori's methods was introduced in the Blackfriars school. In 1913 Simpson joined about eighty other interested educators, from all over the world, in Italy to further study the method first-hand from Montessori. Her report to these educators on her experimental programme in Sydney met with strong approval, in particular from Montessori herself, who praised the successful integration of the method into the Australian classroom setting. In 1914 Simpson published a well-illustrated short book on the method and her experiments with it. The book also appeared in an abridged version in Lone Hand in March 1914. Educators from all over Australia and New Zealand travelled to Sydney to view her method, and one of her Blackfriars teachers introduced the method in Western Australia.
In 1917 Simpson became the first female inspector in New South Wales when she was appointed inspector of infants’ schools. She continued her advocacy of the Montessori method, and in 1920 travelled to England and the USA to study their kindergartens. Her attempts to expand the Montessori method into the bush and suburban schools was not very successful, as enthusiasm for this pedagogy had diminished. She retired in July 1930. A lecture she delivered on the influence of Montessori appeared in the Journal of the Institute of Inspectors of Schools in New South Wales (August, November 1930). She died 7 June 1948 in Sydney and was cremated. She never married.