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. 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 citizenship education more seriously and interpreted them more radically and more imaginatively than anyone within the UK state sector before or since and in so doing earned the praise and support of Summerhill’s A.S.Neill. Here is someone whose commitment to ‘student voice’ is a humbling reminder of how far we have yet to go in even approximating to what he achieved in the decade immediately following the end of the Second World War. This paper begins by articulating the student voice work for which Bloom became so widely known internationally, particularly through his prominent role in the World Education Fellowship. Secondly, it then seeks to locate Bloom’s work within the context of radical state education in England and, to a lesser extent, within wider European radical traditions. Thirdly, it reflects on some recent work in schools and universities that takes the spirit and, to some extent, the actualities of Bloom’s work and develops them within the very different context of state education in England in the first decade of the 21st century.

Drawing on the work of Alex Bloom and the subsequent legacy of radical state education that is currently beginning to re-emerge in some parts of England, it suggests an analytic framework, or radical nexus, that both defines and promotes approaches to education and schooling that prefigure a quite different set of educational, social and political realities than those that are currently dominant in so many countries across the world.