Bedales School

Bedales School was founded in 1893 by the educational reformer John Haden Badley as England's first major progressive co-educational independent boarding school — radically different from the conventional Victorian public schools of its day. Badley founded Bedales specifically as a reaction against the prevailing conventions of late-Victorian boys' boarding schools: he opposed the prefect system, corporal punishment, compulsory chapel, militarised hierarchies and conventional uniform, and he made the school co-educational from 1898 (admitting girls within five years of foundation, decades before any major HMC school). The school operates today on a 120-acre rural campus at Steep, near Petersfield, Hampshire, with its principal buildings designed in the Arts and Crafts style by William Lethaby and Ernest Gimson. The Head is Will Goldsmith.

Bedales is a member of the HMC and the Boarding Schools Association and educates around 730 pupils with a substantial boarding population. The school's progressive educational ethos has persisted: pupils call teachers by their first names, there is no conventional school uniform, and the school continues to operate with substantially more democratic governance structures than conventional English boarding schools.

The school has produced an extraordinary list of distinguished alumni in the creative arts. The actor Daniel Day-Lewis — three-time Academy Award winner (My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood, Lincoln), the only male actor in cinema history with three Best Actor Oscars and widely regarded as the greatest method actor of his generation — was a Bedalian. Day-Lewis attended Bedales briefly before going to Sevenoaks School.

The model and actress Cara Delevingne (Suicide Squad, Paper Towns) was at Bedales, as was the actress Sienna Miller (Layer Cake, Foxcatcher). The singer-songwriter Lily Allen was a Bedalian. The model and writer Sophie Dahl — granddaughter of Roald Dahl — was at Bedales. The actor Theo James (the Divergent film series) was at Bedales. The actor Robert Hardy CBE (Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter films, Siegfried Farnon in the BBC's All Creatures Great and Small) was a Bedalian.

The novelist and journalist Rebecca West DBE — whose Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), the canonical English travel-history of Yugoslavia, is among the great mid-twentieth-century English non-fiction works — was at Bedales. The architect Sir Peter Cook — founder of Archigram, the seminal 1960s avant-garde architecture group — was a Bedalian. The political theorist Sir Bernard Crick — author of In Defence of Politics (1962), an influential post-war defence of liberal-democratic politics — was a Bedalian.

The school operates a substantial bursary programme.