SEPTEMBER 2025 EVENTS

As autumn begins, so can your child’s journey in a school where learning is alive, hands-on, and deeply connected to the world around them.

Autumn Term

Summer Start-of-Term Assembly

23 April - 23 September, 2025
Time: TBC

School starts the Summer Term on Wednesday, 23rd April 2025 with an assembly for Classes 1 – 12 in the School Hall.

The school gates open at 8.20am. Lessons begin at 8.40am.

Session Dates

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News pieces in this week’s School newsletter:Tuesday Notice

Summer Start-of-Term Assembly

7 September - 28 March, 2025
Time: TBC

The school gates open at 8.20am. Lessons begin at 8.40am.

Spring Term 2025

Term begins:                                    Tuesday 7 January

Half Term:                                          Friday 7 February (1pm) – Friday 14 February inclusive

Term ends:                                         Friday 28 March (1pm)

 

Session Dates

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News pieces in this week’s School newsletter:Tuesday Notice

Early Years Parent Education Evening: Rhythm, Repetition, Reverence

Tuesday, September 9, 2025
6:30pm

The Early Years Department will be hosting parent education evenings. We will discuss early childhood themes in relation to our pedagogy here at the Edinburgh Steiner School.Themes such as:
  • Free play
  • Learning through imitation
  • Rhythm, repetition and reverence
  • Foundational senses (life, self-movement, balance and touch)
  • Warmth
  • Fairy Tales/Stories in the kindergarten
These evenings are intended to nourish you, dear parents – to fill your cup. We hope that we can support your parenting journey as well as support a healthy “magic triangle” consisting of parent, child and teacher/school. Please mark your diaries for the first evening – Tuesday, 9 September in the Treetops room. Doors will open at 6pm for light refreshments. Talk begins at 6:30. Our request is for each child to be represented at these evenings. Your attendance matters and is expected. It builds our relationship, supports you in understanding how we work with children in a Waldorf kindergarten and most importantly, supports your child. Our first theme will be the 3 R’s – rhythm, repetition and reverence. Within this theme, we will also touch on establishing healthy boundaries and the effects of screen time on early childhood development. It would be most helpful to tailor some of the sessions to parental requests. Please write to Tess McNatt at tess.mcnatt@edinburghsteinerschool.org.uk if there are any specific topics you would like to be covered next academic year. We would very much like to meet your needs and have these evenings be fun and collaborative!  Aki, Wei Ling, Lorna and Tess

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News pieces in this week’s School newsletter: Tuesday Notice

September Holiday

September 15, 2025

There will be no school on Monday, 15th September, 2025

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News pieces in this week’s School newsletter: Tuesday Notice

Anniversary of first Waldorf school

Fri, September 19, 2025

Invited by Emil Molt – the managing director of the Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Company in Stuttgart, Germany- and his wife Berta, Dr Rudolf Steiner visited the children in the factory in the year 1919. They hoped to build a sensible curriculum that would address the future with a new form of raising children to think differently, finding ways to think in order to decide on more constructive ways to end conflict than the wasteful and destructive World War they had just survived.

Rudolf Steiner could see the urgent need for human beings to view themselves as beings of body, soul, and spirit, to avoid the kind of brutal view of pure materialism that had led them into war.  For a future worthy of human beings and of human endeavour, this inclusion of the spiritual side of all people must be accomplished. Most people think immediately of religion as soon as anything spiritual enters into worldviews. Steiner’s thoughts on spirituality transcended religion. He saw the spirit as an essential element in the human being’s organism. One need only think of aspirations, idealism, friendship, inspiration, and love, to understand this necessary spiritual side of being human.

"The need for imagination, a sense of truth, and a feeling of responsibility; these are the very nerve of education..."

-Rudolf Steiner.

The school opened on 19th September, 1919. During the Second World War, on 31 March 1938, the Nazis shut down the School, but not before 34 Waldorf schools had been founded – in Germany, Switzerland, Holland, England, Norway, Sweden, Hungary, Austria, and in the USA. It became the model for further schools to open, including The Edinburgh Rudolf Steiner School Trust (now Edinburgh Steiner School) on 4th May, 1939. Steiner’s insights and methods became known as Waldorf Education, or Steiner Education in the UK.

It introduced a unique concept of child development, and a plan for educating children so as to include the spiritual, emotional, social, and moral aspects of the young human beings, as well as the physical and intellectual elements already-dominant since the late 19th century and continuing into our own.

It is now the largest global network of independent non-denominational schools. There are 1,200 Steiner Waldorf schools and 2,000 Kindergartens in some ninty countries on every habitable continent.

Steiner School is a registered collective mark of the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship (SWSF). Edinburgh Steiner School is a charity registered in Scotland No. SC002109

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News pieces in this week’s School newsletter: Tuesday Notice