Alex Bloom was headteacher at St George’s-in-the-East school (Stepney, London) for 10 years in the immediate aftermath of World War II. In that time, he created a beacon of progressive education in the state sector. As the Daily Mirror reported in 1951, the school did not have “formal lessons in the accepted sense, tests or competitions, prizes for achievement, penalties for failure, imposed punishment, division of children into ‘bright’ or ‘dull’ classes.” According to Bloom, “a child can’t grow up in an atmosphere of fear.” His aim for the school (from Bloom’s obituary in The Times) was “the establishment of a community to which each child should contribute from his own growing confidence and competence, and in which his contribution would be spontaneous, not the by-product of regimentation, punishment, reward or competition.” To achieve this, students and staff created their own rules for community life, curriculum and learning through a network of panels and committees that culminated in the school council. Such an advanced level of children’s agency has been called ‘radical student voice’ (see Fielding below). Bloom was confident that, “Our methods have produced better results for the children than the old methods could ever hope to do.” Inspectors from the Ministry of Education (1948) reported that the school “has given a vision of what the new form of Secondary School can be.” Below, we present extracts from two sources on Bloom’s theory and practice.
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Extracts from Benn, M. (2012). School Wars: The Battle for Britain’s Education. London: Verso. pp. 45-47.
Bloom opened George’s-in-the-East Secondary Modern School in Cable Street, Stepney, on 1 October 1945. From the start he discarded many of the conventions, restrictions and taboos associated with schooling of the period, including corporal punishment, excessive regimentation and competition. He had a stated abhorrence of ‘marks, prizes and competition.’ He was dealing with children living in an area of extreme poverty, in bombed-out streets, with little hope for the future. Many were ‘lonely and bothered souls’, for whom school was their only experience of human warmth and structure…. Two of his guiding principles were that the children should feel that they counted, and that the school community should mean something.
…. St George’s pioneered collaborative, student-centred learning, in which students were encouraged to make up their own curriculum, and to be involved in active debates about what they were going to learn and had learned. St George’s school council facilitated discussions between staff and students about the life of the school, and Bloom staunchly supported the right of students to say what they felt ‘without reprisals’.
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Extracts from Fielding, M. (2005). Alex Bloom, Pioneer of Radical State Education. Forum, 47(2), 119-134.
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.
School Study: … [T]he school had come to the view that ‘the most effective learning is achieved and the keenest interest maintained through’ what they called ‘School Study’. In order to retain the commitment to engaging with the interests of students wide topics, such as ‘Man’s Dependence on Man’, were collectively agreed by staff. Each Form then took one of the agreed facets of the School Study as its own theme and divided it into group topics. Students then worked in self-chosen groups ‘making their notes, building charts, paying their visits, while the teacher proceeded with them as co-adventurer, stimulating them and acting as their ever present help.
Radical student voice: One of the remarkable things about the School Council was that, whilst it had a strong student dimension to it, the School Council at St George-in-the-East was a school council, that is to say, a set of arrangements that enabled the voices of staff and the voices of students to talk, together and separately, at different times for different purposes. It was certainly not the now frequently encountered tokenistic enclave in which some student voices talk to each other without much evidence that staff, or indeed other students, know very much or care very much about what was said and what did or did not happen as a result.
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