Skip to content ↓

Ethos & Aims

We are dedicated to harmonising the physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of each of our pupils in a way that gives them the confidence, resilience and insight to make a positive difference in the world throughout their lives.”

The Education

Inspired by the Waldorf vision of childhood, our education values and celebrates each stage of development, facilitating every child’s gradual self-realisation as part of a social whole. We are dedicated to harmonising the physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of each of our students in a way that gives them the confidence, resilience and insight to make a positive difference in the world throughout their lives. As the longest-running Waldorf School in the world, offering a proven and progressive alternative to the pressurised approach to education, we continually work at deepening our teaching practice, the better to realise these aims.

Michael Hall offers an education to children from Kindergarten to age 18 that addresses the whole being: body, soul and spirit at every stage. Through developing this education as an art, our teachers are inspired by the work of Rudolf Steiner and share this work with the Steiner Waldorf School movement worldwide. Our holistic approach attaches equal importance to the crafts, the arts and intellectual attainment.

With reverence for every child, our support in early childhood builds a foundation for life-long learning. From the age of seven, the Class Teacher guides pupils into society for the first eight years of formal learning with loving authority, with a sense of the wholeness of life, and through making connections. In the Upper School years, pupils encounter a range of subject expertise that can inspire them to find and achieve their own goals.

Our daily work can be experienced as creating culture, like a living stream. In doing so, it preserves an awareness and connection with both environmental and cosmic rhythms. We cultivate an appreciation that the thriving of any individual is based on the support of the community and that, conversely, the thriving community will depend on the awareness of the community within each individual. Teaching is a path of learning for the Teacher. Our teaching gesture is to remove obstacles; in every detail of school life, we encourage initiative.

The Community

As the longest-running Waldorf school in the world, we feel a sense of responsibility to the wider movement as well as to our local community of pupils, parents, teachers and support staff. We are committed to continuing professional development and to training new teachers.

Our setting invites us to celebrate the fact that we are an international community, with a culture of mutual respect, tolerance and inclusion. We rejoice in a strong and diverse team of specialists and, in doing so, we acknowledge a living connection with colleagues who have passed on, drawing from their inspiration.

The Environment

The grounds of Kidbrooke Park daily call for us to nurture the land in every gesture of our education. Care for the environment informs every classroom and every lesson, most obviously in the striving towards the ideal of beauty. In this too, we are a community. We work towards a harmonious interplay of culture, cultivation and conservation.