Cyril Alfred Allen Clarke (20 August 1910 – 12 July 2007) was the founding head of Holland Park School, which was the flagship of the comprehensive education ideal.

When the war came to an end he was retained for another year on the staff of the education branch of the Allied Military Government of Germany.

Holland Park School was glamorous, rubbing shoulders, with the prosperous Kensington and Chelsea borough whose children tended to be privately educated, and yet also included students from the crime and race-riot-ridden Notting Hill area.

On one hand Holland Park School had a reputation among wary conservatives in the Swinging Sixties as a progressive hotbed of perceived dubious morals, and on the other the institution Clarke moulded was run on traditional lines.

This was done in an ambience of local hostility led by the Campden Hill Preservation Society, which had for some years lobbied against opening a modern school in such an area – its members included the future poet laureate John Betjeman.

Clarke's attention to detail included the design of the school badge, which depicted a fox carrying a dahlia in its jaws, the former acknowledging the family name of the lords Holland on whose land the school was built, the latter referring to Lady Holland's introduction of the bloom into England in the early years of the 19th century.

When the school opened its doors in September 1958, the Notting Hill race riots, which had broken out in August, seemed only to underline the formidable nature of the task of healing social divisions that it had set itself.

This was subsequently, in the 1970s under Clarke's successor Derek Rushworth, reversed on the theory that underachieving students would benefit from intellectual association with those of greater ability.