Alex Bloom, Pioneer of Radical State Education

Abstract

Alex Bloom is one of the greatest figures of radical state education in England. His approach to 'personalised learning' and the development of a negotiated curriculum was immeasurably more profound and more inspiring than anything to emerge thus far from the current DfES. His approach to student voice was much more radical than anything presently emerging from the current new wave of activity. His school, St George-in-the-East, a secondary modern school in Stepney in the East End of London, utterly rejected regimentation, corporal punishment (still the norm at the time) and the use of marks, prizes and competition. On the fiftieth anniversary of his death it is fitting to return to learn again from his still unfulfilled legacy. Alex Bloom is arguably one of the greatest figures of radical state education in England, not only in the second half of the twentieth century when he did his most memorable work, but of the entire period of compulsory formal schooling. The period in which he worked as a headteacher (1945-1955) is relatively neglected; the kind of school he led (a secondary modern school) was, rightly, reviled by many of the comprehensive school pioneers; and the kind of education he advocated in his writing and exemplified in his practice (radical democratic schooling in the tradition of the European New Education movement) is the very antithesis of dominant models of state education to which we have been so destructively and ignorantly subjected for an entire generation. Yet Alex Bloom is one of only two heads of state secondary schools to be mentioned in W.A.C.Stewart's magnum opus The Educational Innovators - Volume II: Progressive Schools 1881-1967. His death on Tuesday 20 September, 1955 was reported the following day in The Times and his obituary which appeared on the Saturday talked of a remarkable man whose school, St George-in-the East, Stepney in the East End of London 'with its bomb ruins and overcrowded homes and tenements' had an international reputation as 'a great educational experiment' (The Times 1955).(1) Here is someone whose work significantly inspired one of the best known novels of the post-war generation (2) and one of the most important literary accounts of secondary teaching ever written in English. Here is someone whose work anticipates and still outreaches even the most creative periods of the comprehensive school movement that were to follow. Here is someone who took the democratic imperatives of lived