Steiner free schools debacle shows failure of government drive to promote genuine “diversity” in state system

A few years ago, I watched* a short film about High Tech High, the innovative charter school in San Diego, California which sees students taught to a great extent through projects and which largely eschews exams.

The institution, set up to reject the “factory” model of schooling in favour of something more akin to 21^st century workplaces, was hailed as the “best school in the world” last year by that trendier-than-trendy broadsheet the Daily Telegraph.

But whatever the debates about schools such as this – and sceptics will include traditionalists as well, as perhaps, critics of the academy-like charter schools – one thought stood out.

High Tech High would be impossible in England’s state-funded system. It would be just too radical to survive the twin pressures of our stultifying, top-down, results-driven accountability system and the behind-the-scenes steering of traditionalist ministers.

These thoughts now resurface as I survey the policy car crash that has been the government’s short-lived – and much-contested - willingness to embrace one of education’s more alternative visions through its free schools scheme.

The decision by an academy trust which has taken over three former Rudolf Steiner free schools to ditch most of what made them, within England’s state-funded sector, distinctive and seemingly strongly supported by parents who chose them, underlines how a supposed government commitment to “diversity” in English education is a mirage.

Ultimately, as demonstrated by this and other free schools cases, when it comes to it there is little government commitment to true diversity**. The set-up supposedly overseeing such arrangements is incoherent, in being diametrically opposed to the notion of from-the-ground-up decision-making, and demonstrably unfit for its purpose of making major decisions of huge importance to local communities. And parents, who signed up to these schools in the expectation that policymakers might be committed to the notion of respecting parental preferences at a more than superficial level, have been let down as the institutions foundered not because of any reservations about the Steiner model per se, but for other reasons.

The Steiner movement will I guess strike many readers of this website as a controversial lens through which to view this issue. For Steiner Waldorf schools, which operate around the world and did so only as fee-charging institutions in the UK until 2008, nevertheless regularly attract controversy. They come under fire, for example, for the reportedly racist views of the “intellectual founder” of Steiner schools, Rudolf Steiner, whose belief system is termed “anthroposophy”; for allegations over the “promotion” of homeopathy; and for reportedly low levels of vaccination among their pupils.

That said, those parents at the free schools with whom I have been in contact stress that it is other aspects of their educational offer, including their delayed start to formal learning and their willingness to take the anxiety out of classrooms, which attracted them to the schools. Parents have also argued that the “sometimes odious views of Rudolf Steiner” were not endorsed by the schools. As one parent put it in reaction to a Guardian piece last year, “there is nothing cranky in not wanting our child endlessly tested by stressed teachers”.

Interestingly, too, the application forms which all three free schools submitted to the government as part of the process of opening them promised that “anthroposophy” would not feature in their teaching. They said: “the school will neither promote nor teach Steiner’s wider philosophy, which he called “anthroposophy”. (See forms here, here and here).

Parents point out that these schools are an established feature of education in many countries, including publicly-funded charter schools in America. And nowhere during the saga that has seen the Steiner character of these three free schools eventually taken away were arguments made against the Steiner ethos per se.   

My interest in this case has thus been to ask how a government could be sufficiently willing to embrace radically alternative approaches to education that it could open these schools in the years 2012, 2013 and 2014, only to allow their ethos to be abandoned a few years later. This was seemingly not because of any problem with the principles of Steiner education, but because, once these schools encountered difficulties in the face of England’s inspection system, any DfE support for the non-mainstream approach that had brought these families to the schools melted away.

How the schools lost their Steiner character

How did these schools go from operating as state-funded Steiner institutions to losing that ethos?

The three Steiner free schools were actually the second, third and fourth to be established in the English state-funded sector, the first - Steiner Academy Hereford - having been set up under Labour in 2008. This small school for 3- to 16-year-olds is seemingly successful, operating at capacity, with a current “good” rating from Ofsted.

In 2012, 2013 and 2014, the Department for Education under Michael Gove then opened the Steiner free schools, all for four-to-16-year-olds, in Frome in Somerset, Exeter and Bristol respectively.

The schools’ early inspections from Ofsted were not fantastic: by 2017, Exeter and Bristol were rated “requires improvement” while Frome was “good”. These, though, of course did not constitute failing judgments.

That changed in October and November 2018, however, when co-ordinated inspections ordered by Amanda Spielman, the chief inspector, brought “inadequate” verdicts for all three schools. Serious failings on safeguarding, bullying, leadership, provision for children with special needs and allegedly low standards were reported, in what any observer would conclude were concerning reports.

By February last year, all three schools had been issued with “termination warning notices” by the DfE’s Regional Schools Commissioner, Lisa Mannall, threatening their closure.

“I am…minded to terminate the funding agreement of the academy and transfer the school to a strong multi-academy trust that can provide the capacity for continued improvements,” Mannall wrote in one of the letters.

Then, on November 1^st last year, the three schools were duly transferred to another academy trust: Avanti Schools, based in Stanmore in Middlesex. This was already running Hindu-ethos academies, although the former Steiner free schools would have no religious affiliation.

The trust then announced, to its credit as it was under no obligation to do so by the government, a review of the three schools’ curricula. This was published earlier this month, with recommendations which, as I report today, would take away the essence of the Steiner approach, including its much-valued-by-parents delayed start to formal learning, which has hitherto only been possible in the state-funded sector within these three schools and Steiner Academy Hereford. The review’s recommendations were broadly accepted by Avanti’s board, so will become reality.

In addition, Avanti, seemingly on the orders of the DfE, has also moved drastically to alter the age structure of the schools, with those in Bristol and Frome having their provision for older pupils closed.

In the final stages of this process, remarkably it remains somewhat unclear who has taken the crucial decisions, on the ending of the delayed start to formal learning, and on the age ranges of the schools: the DfE or the trust. 

So what are the issues?

The above history seems particularly important to acknowledge, when seeking to understand what has gone wrong in this case.

The core issue is that, having allowed the schools to be set up, the department and its system for operating and overseeing academies has clearly failed at a very basic level to acknowledge any sense of moral duty to try to support the alternative vision which had attracted these families to the schools in the first place.

The Ofsted reports were fiercely contested by some parents, with a crowdfunding campaign having got going to seek judicial review.

But even if one takes at face value and accepts the Ofsted findings, there is no evidence that the government sought to have the schools’ weaknesses, as set out by Ofsted, addressed within the framework of the Steiner model. For, again, it was, after all, the Steiner framework which had drawn parents to the schools.

Instead, Mannall’s letters suggest the DfE’s view was “these schools are not good enough. We just need to get another provider in to improve them.”

The issue of whether this would support the ethos on which the schools had originally been based seemed not to have been considered: it is as if an outsider to these schools had just looked at the reports and concluded “you’ve had your chance now: tough”.

To put it another way, faced with a choice of adapting the schools so that they could be improved within a Steiner structure, the government was prepared to abandon this model the first time it ran into trouble.

Fran Russell, executive director of the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship, has written a letter to Gavin Wiliamson, Education Secretary. It said: “There is no evidence to suggest there is something intrinsically flawed about Steiner education and its specialised curriculum that would justify a decision to deny parents access to it in any form as the education provision of their choice.”

The letter adds: “Parents seek out our schools for the artistic way in which children are taught without stress and high pressure. The availability of this kind of education within the state sector is essential if parental choice is to be genuine especially when the mainstream approach of introducing formal learning at a younger age than most of our counterparts in Europe is considered by many educationalists and parents to be too stressful for a substantial number of children.”

If there were any evidence of any intrinsic problem with the Steiner model, it certainly seems not to have been any part of the DfE’s argument to make the changes it has. If it were, the Steiner Academy Hereford would not continue to exist.

Other free school cases

Yet this is not an isolated case of the DfE seemingly being very relaxed, or unthinking, about effectively ditching the approach on which a free school had been founded when it runs into difficulty.

Earlier this year, parents at the soon-to-close International Academy of Greenwich(IAG), in south-east London, told me how they had chosen the free school for again what is, within the conventional state sector, an alternative approach.

This secondary school taught the International Baccalaureate (IB), with its cross-curricular, globally-oriented approach, throughout its year groups. Parent Louise Grace told me she had chosen the school as an alternative to the “factory” model of education which she felt was inappropriate for many children.

The school is closing because of a planning fiasco, as outlined here. But what struck me was Louise Grace’s contention that those in charge – the DfE and the local authority – appeared to have given no thought to the need either to find other premises allowing this school to continue with its distinctive offer, or whether other local schools might be able to support the IB, so that pupils could continue with the educational approach, and in an ideal world the specific curricula, which they had been following.

In other words, having allowed this alternative structure to be set up in the first place, the authorities had not been prepared to back that vision by ensuring pupils continued to receive the educational approach on which they had embarked. Setting up schools in this manner looks like shallow politics, rather than backing policy with a commitment to those affected by it.

Grace and other IAG parents told me how they looked on in dismay as the establishment of yet another Harris free school was planned for their borough, with its proposed pupil numbers then seemingly used in calculations suggesting the IAG was no longer needed, in preference to this genuinely distinctive already-existing local school.

This pattern also surfaced at another highly controversial free school: Route 39 in north Devon. Having been built in a former Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, at seemingly great cost to the taxpayer, the school soon ran into trouble, resulting in it also being handed to another academy trust.

In the process, however, the progressive approach on which it was founded appears to have been ditched in favour of something seemingly much more in line with the vision of Nick Gibb, the arch-traditionalist schools minister. Again, this had not been what had attracted families to it in the first place.

I suspect that a similar story lies behind the recent case of Plymouth School of Creative Arts. Set up, again, to offer a radically different approach – which seems to carry some echoes of High Tech High – it talked of approaching “all subjects through making” and boasted an open-plan, award-winning architectural design. But Ofsted was not impressed, the school was transferred to a multi-academy trust, and a local source told this website: “The attempt at a progressive education has been pretty much ditched along with the building.”

To be clear, I am agnostic with respect to arguments on which these schools were founded. As a family, we chose a local authority primary school for our children, and have been very happy with it. On the other hand, I sympathise greatly with parents such as Louise Grace who look at England’s school system, and particularly the pressure politicians place on institutions to raise results, which then too often may feeds into bad effects for pupils, and want something very different.

Steiner parents seem to be very keen on a departure from this norm. These views may well also be part of the stark recent rise in the number of parents who, even before Covid-19, were home educating their children.

Most of the schools mentioned in this piece were controversial locally on their foundation, perhaps especially the Steiner institutions. Such local controversies, of course, have been well worth investigating and debating, and need to be weighed in any evaluation of the to-any-objective-observer-clearly-much-troubled free schools policy.

But the key point is that once it had allowed free schools to be set up in the spirit of diversity, in the absence of any willingness to reconsider the free schools policy per se, the DfE had a moral duty to the families who had chosen them to see these projects through.

That it did not see the need to abide by this duty is extraordinarily revealing: the support for diversity on which the free schools programme was supposedly founded turns out to have been skin deep.

It could be pointed out, here, that innovative approaches do continue within free schools. Steiner Academy Hereford survives (and thrives, according to SWSF), while traditionalist Michaela Community School in Brent, north London, has brought a much-debated new approach to behaviour management and subject teaching to English classrooms. The more progressive School 21 in Stratford, East London, is also Ofsted-outstanding.

But this may just underline a feeling that free schools can operate reasonably happily so long as they continue to be successful, within the DfE’s conventional definitions of success in what is a high-stakes accountability regime: having decent academic results and Ofsted verdicts. Should they stray from that, the DfE’s support for diversity will end, whatever parents may think.

This may reflect a long-standing incoherence in Conservative-led policy since 2010. While ministers talk of allowing a devolved, “school-led system” in which professionals are in charge, and even though the free schools programme was promoted as being parent-, rather than politician-led, Gibb in particular has been keen to try to steer the system at every opportunity in the direction he personally favours.

To put it another way, if the free schools project’s supposed embrace of diversity clashes with the top-down accountability system as set up by ministers, there is only going to be one winner. So that commitment to diversity does not amount to much, in the end.

So I feel my hunch was right: High Tech High would be just too radical to survive for any length of time in the English state system.

Weaknesses in English schools reform’s decision-making structure

The Steiner free schools debacle has other important implications, I feel, for what can be read into England’s structure of decision-making on schools’ futures.

The main one is a lack of clarity about where decision-making actually sits, borne of – yes, this website is constantly picking up on this in relation to academy system strategy - an absence of transparency.

It seems as if what is the most contentious decision of this entire affair – to take away the exemptions from the early years foundation stage of the three Steiner free schools, which had allowed them to opt out of formal early learning and tests, and which seem so strongly to have attracted parents – was taken by the Department for Education behind the scenes.

I say “it seems as if” because, staggeringly, it is still not entirely clear which party actually made the move.

It is alleged that the DfE, having allowed the exemptions in funding agreements under which the three free schools were set up, simply refused to allow them in the agreements which were then drawn up as Avanti took the schools on.

There are then questions about whether Avanti could have applied to the DfE to have them reinstated.

This structure seems entirely inadequate for the task it faces. It is surely reasonable to expect that, if a government allows a school to be set up with a certain approach to education which parents have backed, that if that approach is to be changed, that decision-making at least should be clear, open-minded and transparent.

It should not be a case of seemingly handing the problem to a new academy trust, who then can imply there is little they can do, as the government has taken the decision privately. This reeks of mutual buck-passing.

The bizarrely contrasting philosophies behind establishing a free school, and seeing it allowed to keep going

The notion of individual providers presenting the government with alternative approaches to education, which are then approved by the DfE, was one of the foundational ideas on which free schools were built.

But once these schools get established, they are having to exist in a decision-making system which is the polar opposite of such a from-the-ground-up idea.

For the government now makes decisions on whether schools are to continue to exist, or whether the ethos on which parents based life-shaping decisions is to survive, in a completely top-down manner. That is, it is decision-making by the government in private, with parents not even given a clear view of which body has taken the key decisions, let alone the right to have any meaningful influence over them, or even detailed information about them.

The disjuncture between such structures it is extraordinary: if the top-down element ends up presiding over decisions which seem entirely out of sympathy with the more devolved aspect on which these institutions were founded, it is hardly surprising. This is a striking problem with the way this system has been set up.

(And I wonder if the system’s central idea for dealing with operational failures - that the answer is to hand schools over to another academy trust – did not run into a brick wall in this case. For what other trust could, in reality, offer the Steiner education that parents at these schools wanted?)

In this case a more reasonable set-up, based on policymakers respecting the implications of their policies for service users, would have seen the government establish a truly independent investigation, exploring as a first principle whether it was possible to continue with the Steiner approach on which these schools were founded, despite their Ofsted struggles. And whether, having set up these schools with primary and secondary sections, again to which parents subscribed on choosing these schools, the government had a duty to continue with that beyond the first few years. 

But this would have involved policymakers having a deeper commitment to the principle of diversity, and doing the right thing by families who had bought into the free schools policy, than this case has shown them as having. Instead, these and other free schools cases show the concept of diversity in the state system has been an exercise in political box-ticking by this government, without any coherent thinking and logistical commitment to underpin it.

Academy trust’s review

Instead, it was left to an individual academy trust, with powers over those exemptions which were not clear, to set up its own probe. This set out, at the outset, that it “did not have the scope to analyse why the [former Steiner free] schools had failed”. This, then, seemingly ruled out the possibility that specific operational failings could have been addressed with the aim of preserving the distinctively Steiner approach that families had chosen.

For all its many more progressive statements, the review also included a line, in setting out what kind of approach would be favoured in the new Avanti schools,  which seemed utterly at odds with the anxiety-avoiding ethos which parents seem to want.

It talked about “raising standards in core subjects quickly in order to instigate school cultural change. This is a key recommendation by Ofsted and a requirement for Avanti Schools Trust to affect [sic] rapid change. This will ensure that all members of the community have clarity about expectations and can become part of the solution”.

To this seasoned observer of the implications of results pressures in schools, this suggests an authoritarian approach, accepting Ofsted’s big stick, which is likely to be exactly what parents were seeking to avoid through choosing these schools. For, apparently, they are to be seen either “part of the solution”, imposed on them, or part of the problem.

A delayed start to formal education, which these parents clearly want and which seems a not unreasonable preference given its operation in other countries, was simply rejected by the review. If indeed this was because of a stance taken behind the scenes by the government, then there was simply no chance of any public debate on this fundamental principle. It is telling, on this front, that the argument that other countries successfully start formal education later was dismissed in a single sentence in the review report, on the argument, basically, that different countries operate in different contexts. So that’s it, then?

To put it another way, the notion of allowing a small number of schools within England’s state sector to support a later start to formal learning was very interesting. There clearly seems, to me, to be quite a substantial parental constituency for such a model. But this idea now ends up being ditched, in all but one school, not through any reasoned, detailed argument, to be set out at length and debated in public, but through what seems an incoherent process of behind-the-scenes decision-making. As a summary of the lack of strategic planning afflicting English schools policymaking – and seemingly, now, being seen much more widely across government – this could hardly be bettered.   

This fiasco may have a final bitter twist, with some evidence that parents at the three schools have been voting with their feet. My guess is that Avanti are going to have a fight on their hands to run these schools successfully, given those numbers, though I could be proved wrong. If the schools do continue to struggle, then the whole saga will suggest a huge waste of time, effort and taxpayer cash. Overall, this seems a case study in bad policy.

In any case, the notion of a parent-led, from-the-ground-up system is an utter sham. Parents should be clear about this, entering any free school with their eyes open about the weaknesses in its structure. 

*I saw the film at an event put on by Steam Co, the group campaigning for creativity in schools.

** I mean diversity of educational experience for the pupil, rather than the alphabetic soup of categories of schools over which this and previous governments have presided, and which is sometimes said to constitute a “diverse” system.