The Guardian has published a glowing review of Drumduan Upper School, a Steiner school co-founded by Tilda Swinton:
Through the windows Krzysztof points to a pair of handsome canoes sitting outside, and fetches a paddle for my inspection. “They were made out of slabs of local Douglas fir, with no machines and no vices, just clamps on desks,” he says. To Krzysztof the boat is a paragon of interdisciplinary education. As he puts it: “You’ve got mathematics, geometry, physics of buoyancy, the chemistry of epoxy resins, the art and aesthetic of colour and shape, the process of collaboration and the physical, outdoor experience of it all.” Of course, you’ve also got a boat.
But there is no A-level exam in boat making, and the question of how these students will make it to university should they wish to go – as, for example, Arran does — is never fully resolved. The students’ work is documented in books that they write and design “to their own best intellectual and artistic standard,” and there’s some suggestion that these can take the place of exam results, but in an education system so heavily predicated on grades, it seems a big ask. There are precedents, however. The Acorn School in Gloucestershire is run along near-identical lines. This year, its students were offered places at universities in Bath, Exeter, Manchester and Bristol. The school claims that no Acorn student applying for university has ever failed to secure a place.
Drumduan parents are obviously a highly self-selecting group. Sharon McAlister says she’s not worried by the absence of exams. Her youngest son, Angus, a sparky and genial 15-year-old (“You shouldn’t ask a boy his age,” he jests), spent seven years in the state system, where he was bullied and unhappy, before transferring to Drumduan in 2013. “It’s that wonderful thing of being able to celebrate a burgeoning individualism that you don’t get in a state school,” McAlister tells me. Tilda refers to this as “each chain on each moving bicycle” in contrast to the widespread practice of teaching children as if they’re all on the same bike. “I didn’t have a particularly toxic education, but my chain was not on my bicycle,” says Tilda. “I managed to coast down a few hills and got off and walked the rest of the way.”
I like to describe Steiner, or Waldorf, schools as what people only vaguely familiar with Montessori schools imagine when they hear them described.
Rudolph Steiner founded anthroposophy, a proto-New Age philosophy.