The Inadequacy of British State-Funded Steiner Schools
We’ve been following the development of state-funded Steiner education in the UK for years. Recently, there has been a lot of media attention when Kings Langley was forced to shut down over safety concerns.
We now have learned that OFSTED reports are judging additional state-funded Steiner Schools in Great Britain to be “inadequate”.
Sally Weale wrote an article stating that “Copies seen by the Guardian reveal inspectors’ concerns about a wide range of issues including safeguarding, bullying and lack of support for children with special educational needs and disabilities.”
The report for Frome Steiner School states that “the school failed to address serious issues that “put pupils at risk of harm”, that some behaviour management is “disproportionate and unsafe” and safeguarding is not effective.”
The report from the Bristol Steiner Academy mentions that “Pupils are exposed to avoidable risk of harm,” and that “bullying incidents are too frequent” (as if there can ever be an acceptable level of abuse of our children).
This follows Exeter Steiner academy being transferred to a multi-academy trust after also being rated as “inadequate” by OFSTED in December 2018.
Only one state-funded Steiner School was rated “good”: the one in Hereford. However, we have unpublishable testimonies from former parents of Hereford describing exactly the same problems. Why unpublishable? Because those parents fear the well documented repercussions meted out by Steiner communities worldwide when such experiences are made public.
This is a sad state of affairs because we tried to highlight this very problem for a long time, ever since we realised that what happened to us in a little Steiner School in New Zealand wasn’t an isolated incident, but part of a worldwide modus operandi. We produced a video back in May of 2012, before the very idea of state funding Steiner education in the UK was approved by the government, to bring attention to this problem.
Over the years, we have reported on similar issues in Steiner Schools across the world, in New Zealand, America, Canada, France, Switzerland, the UK and most recently in India.
Cock Up or Conspiracy?
Steiner communities (staff members, acolyte parents) argue that these are all isolated incidents and do not reflect the Steiner philosophy as a whole, but this ignores a document from the Goetheanum, the worldwide Headquarters of the Steiner movement. This statement says that a school can only brand itself as a Steiner-Waldorf school if it abides by specific criteria. One of these is that “pedagogical methods [are] used in dealing with discipline”.
The problem is that the philosophy behind the Steiner pedagogy - Anthroposophy - is deeply rooted in karma and reincarnation, and there is a strong belief from the staff that bullying is merely karma rebalancing itself, and is therefore a reason for them not to interfere.
Our own experience highlighted a deep resistance to curtail bullying. We were told that to stop a bully from bullying would damage the bully. They even wrote in the school newsletter that “Denied his or her usual behavior, a [bully] may simply become compulsive about something else, like video games”, and that bullied children had it coming to them: “children who are regularly victimized by bullies may also be engaging in addictive behavior.”
Three years later we achieved a landmark Human Rights settlement in which the school admitted to having failed our children by refusing to deal with the unchecked-bullying she and so many other pupils experienced. Four years after that, we were informed that the bully who had been so well protected by the school and its community, had pleaded guilty to having raped three minors.
The repercussions of blaming karma for bullying are far reaching and tragic. And to think Zoë Williams of the Guardian casually claims that “the philosophy seemed pretty benign”.
Broken Promises
Back in July 2014, we had interviewed Joe Evans, one of the people who spearheaded the creation of the then named Bristol Steiner Free School, about how his school would deal with unchecked bullying.
He tried to allay our concerns:
“The zero-tolerance approach is pretty widely accepted now. It fits in with the ethos of the school. It’s again about having that sense of a culture which everyone feels a part of, and the action that the school takes around bullying is intended to draw the aggressor, to draw the bullying back into that culture, to bring them into an understanding of what it is that they’ve done and why it’s unacceptable, and that it can’t and won’t happen again.”
We had also asked him to comment on our own experience, where a Steiner School had protected a known and dangerous bully, expelled his target, and vilified the target’s family, rather than making the bully understand “that what they’ve done is unacceptable”:
“The kind of situation you describe sounds profoundly wrong in the way that a school should deal with bullying, and it sounds as if either the right policy framework was never there, or if it was there is was profoundly misinterpreted, and we wouldn’t be happy with anything remotely like that.”
He concluded that, “We’re taking the talk at the minute. We’ve got to walk the walk as well. We have to deliver on all of this.”
The damning conclusion by OFSTED that “pupils are not safe” at the Steiner Academy Bristol illustrates that you can’t walk the walk when your good intentions clash with a pedagogy deeply rooted in Anthroposophy.
Update [25 Jan 2019]: The Steiner Academy Bristol is launching a legal action against OFSTED, but not because they are disputing the report which stated that pupils aren’t safe and are experiencing far too much bullying. They are arguing against the school being taken over by a multi-academy trust.
The reason for this could be explained by what Grégoire Perra, a former anthroposophist, wrote some years ago: “According to my understanding, the explanation is that in the eyes of an anthroposophical teacher, a Steiner-Waldorf school isn't actually a Steiner-Waldorf school at all! It is the place for incarnating the spiritual forces who will save humanity!”
Therefore, if a trust which doesn’t understand this celestial goal takes over, the angelic beings’ plans will be thwarted, and it seems it’s better to go to court over that, than to make sure the children in your care are safe.
