It’s now public knowledge that Ofsted is saying that what they deem to be “failing” Steiner schools could be shut down.

This will horrify families across the region who have deliberately chosen a Steiner school for their children, to escape the creative desert that is the testing-obsessed mainstream schooling for which both main political parties are responsible.

Ofsted head Amanda Spielman says that ministers must examine ‘the underlying principles of Steiner education and consider the extent to which they may have contributed to common failures’. This is beginning to sound like an all-out assault on an education that has the audacity to produce free-thinking young people.

Ofsted has just one narrow way of assessing schools, which thus leaves little if any room for alternative pedagogical approaches.

This is because, based on Ofsted’s narrowly inflexible assessment criteria, if Steiner schools aren’t doing exactly what mainstream schools do, they’re then found to be “inadequate”, and then threatened with closure – or (surprise, surprise) forced assimilation by an academy chain.

This violates any conceivable definition of natural justice.

Steiner schools have a fundamentally different ethos that Ofsted’s punitive bean-counter approach – that has fear and a low-trust ideology at its core – just doesn’t comprehend.

Parents enthusiastically choose these schools precisely because they don’t want their children subjected to the narrow, test-obsessed Gradgrindism of mainstream schooling policed by the Ofsted regime.

If Ofsted itself were “inspected” by authorities informed by a Steiner ethos, it would doubtless be found “inadequate” on a range of criteria.

The recommendation might even be that Ofsted be abolished, and replaced by a supportive inspectorate that empowers, replacing the existing one that often punishes and publicly humiliates the schools it inspects.

Hundreds of parents and families across the region are relying on Ofsted being held to account, and its biased bullying practices being flushed out.

Nothing less than the very legitimacy of the whole education system is at stake.

Dr Richard House

Former Steiner Kindergarten teacher

Stroud