A Statutory Right To A Treetops Kindergarten Year

February 25 2025

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The deadline to apply for a 4-year-olds’ statutory right to a funded Kindergarten year is this Friday. We invite 2025/26 applications for Treetops now. Places are confirmed up to six months ahead of enrolment, namely from today for the start of our academic year.

Edinburgh Steiner School and its sister Waldorf schools across the UK are outliers within the British education sector, offering a Kindergarten environment to children aged 0-6. Scotland has one of the youngest school starting ages in the world, with children as young as 4.5 years-old starting P1. Our Treetops Kindergarten invites children aged 4.5 – 6 years old, including those children who have a legal right to a deferred starting date.

If your child’s date of birth is between 11 August 2020 and 28 February 2021 you are able to apply by this FRIDAY for a deferrment, in order to gain a funded place in our Treetops Kindergarten.

Uniquely, for 85 years we have run a curriculum that embraces a later start to formal learning. Children here start their school career aged 6, in line with 1,200 Steiner Waldorf schools in some 80 countries. Before then, they learn in an environment that is holistic, tangible, unhurried, without the notion of academic benchmarks.

Our kindergarten curriculum is embedded in a child development approach. Since young children learn by example, our long-established Waldorf Kindergarten Teachers strive to be worthy of imitation, delivering a comprehensive curriculum through experience, through doing; ultimately, through play – now widely recognised as the work of a young child.

 Read how the daily Kindergarten activities meet the child’s development:

‘Learning Through Creative Doing’

The years 0-7 are of vital importance to a child’s social, emotional, physical and intellectual development. For this reason, every aspect of our Kindergartens is carefully considered, from the pedagogy, to the architecture, to the child’s nourishment.

Apply for your 4-year-olds statutory right to further ELC year by 28th February, 2025

Apply for it to be a ‘Treetops year

On paper, Curriculum for Excellence has a profound understanding of child development, encouraging a play-based start for children in Primary Two and below. Yet this may not be what will meet children in their local nursery or school; and when this is the case, parents understandably look for an alternative.

We are thankfully impervious to the stresses put on many nurseries from the literacy and numeracy tests in P1. Our pupils seamlessly transition to Class 1 in their seventh year, with Treetops offering a deliberate Kindergarten environment; and our first year of school being held by a Class teacher who will ideally remain with the cohort for the next six to eight years. In our rapidly changing world, having the same Class Teacher through most, if not all, of their Lower School years provides a haven of stability and continuity which is extremely rare in other schools.

From our standpoint, the work that takes place in these fundamental early years is of vital importance to our pupils’ overall wellbeing, to their readiness for the school journey ahead, and to cultivating a lifelong love and curiosity for the process of learning itself.

Really, if our goal is for children to become educated and to become creative learners and doers, then it is all the more important that they take the time, that they build and grow their bodies before they start sitting at a desk, looking at worksheets and writing, without playing as much as they need to. It takes them away from the work that they cannot go back and do later.

They have to do this in these Early Years: building their brain, building their organs, building their bodies; integrating all their senses, so that when they come and actually are ready for desk work, they are not still struggling with distractions and difficulties and inability to be still and listen and focus; which is really a setback actually… in the bigger picture.”

Lisa Gordon, Class Teacher to the then new Class 1 (now Class 5) in ‘A Playful Foundation For Academics’ A Playful foundation for Academics – Nursery Guide Edinburgh published in the Nursery Guide Edinburgh.

You can read an article by Treetops Kindergarten Teacher, Tess Mcnatt, about a day in our Kindergarten Three, published in Nursery Guide Edinburgh here.