Long-awaited curriculum review at three former Steiner free schools effectively kills off the educational approach on which they were founded

Parents who told an academy trust’s curriculum review that they favoured a radically alternative approach to schooling - including a delayed start to formal education for their children - have now effectively been informed that they cannot have it.

The curriculum review commissioned by a trust which has taken over three former Steiner free schools in the West Country appears to have helped killed off the Waldorf arrangements on which they were founded, and which parents opted for when the institutions were set up.

The Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship, which supports Steiner schools in the UK and Ireland, has now written to Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, warning that the lives of the parents and children involved have been “turned upside down” and urging him to explain why the government had, it said, now removed from them the choice of this approach.

The development seems to have profound implications for how the government’s alleged drive to promote “diversity” in the English state education system is viewed, as I write in a separate piece here.

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