Integrative Education Exhibition To Be Showcased At Founder’s Day Spring Fair

February 1 2024

Many of our former pupils will have completed a Class 8 project, which has been part of the curriculum at ESS since 1996. Now the backbone of the IE Award – they are the first in a suite of innovative qualifications offered at the school.

Class 8 will be showcasing their Independent Projects at the Spring Fair. All of the pupils are a whole year younger than the specified age for this qualification and level of study, such is their capacity for focused, self-directed activity.

Nobel Laureate in Neuroscience and Waldorf graduate, Thomas Südhof is Patron of the Acknowledging Creative Thinking Skills (ACTS) project, from which the suite of Integrative Education qualifications offered at ESS were derived.

Since 2018, 49 pupils gained an IE Award, and 23 have been awarded their IE Certificate, after competing a ground-breaking module in Creative Thinking Skills, equivalent to a GCSE. The first cohort of pupils included these alternative educational passports to summative exams on their UCAS applications in December.

Embedded in the DNA of these portfolio-based qualifications are eleven creative thinking skills. The World Economic Forum states that by 2025, the top five skills employers will be looking for include innovation, complex problem solving, critical thinking, creativity and originality. Creativity is one of our most essential skills.

We will be celebrating 85th years since the school was founded on 2nd May,1939 at this event. The Integrative Education exhibition will be part of a full programme, alongside the Advanced Highers Art Exhibition, Alumni Lunch and market stalls.

The event is open to our community of enrolled families, our wider Waldorf friends, including all former scholars, parents and teachers, and close friends. Prospective families curious to join are most welcome.