Her father was in the shipping business and her early years were spent in Marseille and Genoa, hence her fluency in Italian and French.

Coming to England to complete her education, she trained as a domestic science teacher and for a short while taught the subject at a college in Sheffield.

In the early months of World War I she was appointed by the Board of Education as H. M. Inspector of domestic science in South West England based in Bath.

In this role one of her main tasks was the consolidation of the Society's educational work at Letchworth Garden City into St Christopher School, which was co-educational and boarding, with Isabel King as its Headmistress.

Beatrice Ensor, together with the editors of the other two journals, formed the initial organising committee of the N.E.F., which held international conferences at two yearly intervals, presided over by distinguished educationists and pedagogues.

In 1929 the conference was held in Kronborg Castle, Helsingör, Denmark and amongst the delegates and speakers were Maria Montessori, Rabindranath Tagore, Jean Piaget, Kurt Lewin, Adolphe Ferrière fr:Adolphe Ferrière, Ovide Decroly, Helen Parkhurst, Pierre Bovet fr:Pierre Bovet, A. S. Neill, Elisabeth Rotten, Franz Cižek, Dr Harold Rugg, Professor T P Nunn, and Paul Geheeb de:Paul Geheeb.

Other conferences were held at Locarno (1927), Cheltenham and Heidelberg (1925), She was a member of the Education Advisory Committee of the Labour Party for a short while but her utopian views clashed with those of R. H. Tawney and resigned her position.

In 1925 Isabel King and Beatrice Ensor left to establish Frensham Heights, a co-educational school in Surrey, from Montessori to university entrance level, for which Mrs. Edith Douglas-Hamilton (one of the Wills tobacco heiresses) provided the capital.

and undertook two lecture trips to North America in 1926 and 1928, speaking on new movements in education in Boston, New York City, Detroit, and Chicago.

Her husband had moved to Louterwater in South Africa where he acquired a large farm in a little developed valley, recently found to be suitable for the growing of deciduous fruit.

When it became clear that her son would be pursuing a civil service career, just as her brothers had done, and did not want to take on the farm she sold it and moved to a house on the coast at Keurboomstrand near Plettenberg Bay.

But when her family were settled in England she moved there to be with her grandchildren, living first at Blackheath, then in London, at Dolphin Square, where she died in 1974.