Elmfield has won the 2013 Independent Schools Award for the headline category of Education Initiative of the Year. This reflects the focus on a fully-rounded education where exams are only one part of the picture. The judges were particularly impressed with the upper school’s morning modules, main lessons and creative Waldorf curriculum. Jason Pond, on behalf of the staff, was presented with the award by the guest speaker, John McCarthy, at a packed award ceremony in Nottingham with over 250 delegates from schools across the UK. Earlier this year the school was also shortlisted for the 2013 Pearson Teaching Awards and the 2013 Times Educational Supplement Awards.

10:00am Tuesday 19th November 2013 in News A RINGWOOD teenager has won an international sailing event – and met Olympic legends. Milo Gill-Taylor, 13, a pupil at the Ringwood Waldorf School, won the Junior Gold Cup in Bermuda and got to meet his heroes Sir Ben Ainslie and Iain Percy. The talented youngster qualified for the contest after winning the GBR Optimist Selection Trials and becoming British National Champion. What he didn’t know was that he would also be running coaching sessions for disadvantaged Bermudan sailors alongside the stellar sailors, and staying in the same family home as Sir Ben and Percy. Milo said: “When we arrived in Bermuda Ben Nicholls, whose house we were staying at, came to get us from the airport. As we came out of the airport he said there was someone else in the car – then Ben Ainslie stepped out. “I was stunned but he is a really, really nice guy – it was incredible.” Spending so much time with Sir Ben – the most successful Olympic sailor in history with his haul of five consecutive medals – along with double Olympic champion Iain Percy, proved to be inspirational. Going into the last day Milo was ten points behind the Australian sailor Max Quirk, and looked an unlikely winner. But Milo came from behind to win the final honours. And the experienced sailors were on hand to give him some advice. “They had just done their semi-final of the Bermuda Gold Cup,” said Milo. “They told me what to expect, which side was favouring and what the wind was doing. When Ben Ainslie and Iain Percy tell you things like this you listen. Winning the event was amazing but staying in the same team house as Ben Ainslie and Iain Percy and their team was beyond anything I could have imagined.” Milo is now setting his sights on the Winter Championships and events in Vigo, Palma, Palamos and Garda. Waldorf School administrator Nigel Revill said: “Everyone at the school is thrilled at Milo’s success. “He is such a talented student who does so well combining his school life with a very promising future in sailing.”

Autobiography – Thomas C. Südhof When I was born in Göttingen in 1955, the aftermaths of the second world war were still reverberating. I was born into an anthroposophical family. My maternal grandparents had been early followers for Rudolf Steiner’s teaching, and worked for Waldorf schools when Hitler assumed power and banned the anthrophosophical movement. Waldorf schools were closed, and my grandfather was conscripted to work in a chemical munitions factory – it was a miracle he survived the war. My uncle was drafted into the army right out of school, and when I was born, he had just returned from the Soviet Union after 10 years as a prisoner of war. My parents were physicians, with my father pursuing a career in academic medicine, while my mother cared for our growing family. My father’s training led him to the United States during the time I was born; as a result, he learned of my arrival by telegram as he was learning biochemical methods in San Francisco, where in a twist of fate I now live. I spent my childhood in Göttingen and Hannover, and graduated from the Hannover Waldorf school in 1975. I had been interested in many different subjects as a student, any subject except sports. I did not know what to do with my life after school, except that I was determined not to serve in the military. More by default than by vocation, I thus decided to enter medical school, which kept all avenues open for a possible career in science or as a practitioner of something useful – being a physician – and allowed me to defer my military service. I studied first in Aachen, the beautiful former capital of Charles the Great, and then transferred to Göttingen, the former scientific center of the Weimar republic, in order to have better access to laboratory training since I became more and more interested in science. Soon after arriving in Göttingen, I decided to join the Dept. of Neurochemistry of Prof. Victor P. Whittaker at the Max-Planck-Institut für biophysikalische Chemie. I was attracted to this department because it focused on biochemical approaches to probe the function of the brain, following up on Whittaker’s discovery of synaptosomes in the two preceding decades, his development of methods to purify synaptic vesicles, and his increasing interest in the cell biology of synaptic vesicle exo- and endocytosis. As a lowly ‘Hiwi’ (‘Hilfswissenschaftler’ for ‘helping scientist’) in Whittaker’s department, I was assigned the task of examining the biophysical structure of chromaffin granules, which are large secretory vesicles of the adrenal medulla that store catecholamines and ATP. Although my project developed well, I started exploring other questions in parallel as I became more and more familiar with doing experiments, while simultaneously studying medicine at the university. I am infinitely grateful to Victor Whittaker for giving me complete freedom in his department in pursuing whatever I thought was interesting, and continued working in his department after my graduation from medical school and my internship in 1982, until I moved to the US in 1983. Among the studies I performed during my time in Whittaker’s department in Göttingen, the most significant is probably the isolation and characterization of a new family of calciumbinding proteins that we called ‘calelectrins’ because we had purified them from the electric organ of Torpedo marmorata. ‘Calelectrins’ were among the first identified members of an enigmatic and evolutionarily ancient family of calcium-binding proteins called annexins. Annexins were at the same time discovered in sevaral other laboratories, and I am proud of the fact that we contributed to the first description of this fascinating protein family, although to this date their function remains unknown. After I finished medical school, I thought that I wanted to be an academic physician, along the mold of my father who had died when I was in high school. Although my time in Whittaker’s laboratory had taught me to love doing science, I wanted to do something more practical and immediately useful. The standard career for an academic physician in Germany was to go abroad for a couple of years to acquire more clinically oriented scientific training before starting her/his clinical training. Upon surveying the scientific landscape, I decided to join the laboratory of Mike Brown and Joe Goldstein at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas for postdoctoral training. Brown and Goldstein were already famous for their brilliant cell-biological studies when I made this decision, and were equally renowned for using cutting-edge scientific tools to address a central question in medicine, namely how cholesterol in blood is regulated. While in their laboratory, I cloned the gene encoding the LDL receptor, which taught me molecular biology and opened up genetic analyses of this gene in human patients suffering from atherosclerosis. I also became interested in how expression of the LDL receptor is regulated by cholesterol, and identified a sequence element in the LDL receptor gene called ‘SRE’ for sterol-regulatory element that mediates the regulation of the LDL receptor expression by cholesterol. Discovery of the SRE later led to the identification of the SREbinding protein in Brown and Goldstein’s laboratory, which in turn identified new mechanisms of transcriptional regulation effected by intramembrane proteolysis. In 1986, I had the choice of resuming my clinical training, or trying to establish my own laboratory. Much of what I know about science I learned in my three years of postdoctoral training in Brown and Goldstein’s laboratory, and has guided me throughout my career. Probably the best advice Brown and Goldstein gave me, however, was now: they suggested I forego further clinical training and do only science, and they backed up this advice by providing me with the opportunity to start my own laboratory at Dallas. This I did, and I ended up staying in Dallas for another 22 years, interrupted only by a short guest appearance as a Max-Planck-Director in Göttingen (see below). When I started my laboratory at Dallas, I decided to attack a question that was raised by Whittaker’s work, but neglected: how do synaptic vesicles undergo exocytosis, i.e., what id the mechanism of neurotransmitter release which underlies all synaptic transmission? In 1986, Whittaker’s work had shown that synaptic vesicles could be biochemically purified, but nothing was known about the mechanisms of synaptic vesicle exocytosis in particular, and membrane fusion in general. Our approach, initially performed in close collaboration with Reinhard Jahn whose laboratory at that time had just been set up in Munich, was simple, namely to purify and clone every protein that might conceivably be involved, and worry about their functions later. This approach was more fruitful than I could have hoped for, and has arguably led to a fairly good understanding of membrane fusion and neurotransmitter release. In the 25 years since the start of my laboratory, our work, together with those of others, led to the identification of the key elements of the membrane fusion machinery, to the characterization of the functions of these proteins, to the mechanisms of regulating this machinery, and to the description of synapse-specific molecules that bestow the specific properties of neurotransmitter release onto synapses that render synapses so fast and precise, as required for brain function. Some of the proteins whose function we identified are now household names and have general roles in eukaryotic membrane fusion that go beyond a synaptic function, while other proteins are specific to synapses and account for the exquisite precision and plasticity of these elementary computational elements in brain. I feel fortunate to have stumbled onto this overarching neuroscience question at a time when it was ready to be addressed, and it has been tremendous fun to work our way through the various synaptic proteins and their properties that shape their functions. It is important to note, however, that the nature of our studies was not revolutionary. There was not a single major discovery that all at once changed the field, as usually happens for the development of tools (e.g., monoclonal antibodies, patch clamping, or shRNAs, to name a few). The closest our work came to a radical change in the field was probably the identification of synaptotagmins as calcium-sensors for fusion, and of Sec1/Munc18-like proteins (SM-proteins) as genuine membrane fusion proteins, but both hypotheses took more than a decade to become accepted by the field – in fact, the SM-protein hypothesis was only recently adopted by others, 15 years after we proposed it. Thus, our work in parallel with that of Reinhard Jahn, James Rothman, Jose Rizo, Randy Scheckman, Richard Scheller, Cesare Montecucco, Axel Brunger, and many others produced a steady incremental advance that resulted a better understanding of how membranes fuse, one step at a time. As a result of this combined effort, we now know that SNAREs are the fusion catalysts at the synapse, first shown by the discovery that SNAREs are the substrates of clostridial neurotoxins, that SM-proteins in general and Munc18-1 in particular are essential fusion proteins for all membrane fusion events, that a synaptotagmin-based mechanism assisted by complexin underlies nearly all regulation of exocytosis, and that synaptic exocytosis is organized in time and space by an active zone protein scaffold containing RIM and Munc13 proteins as central elements. Ten years after I started my laboratory, while the work described above was progressing, I was offered the opportunity to return to Germany and to organize a Department of Neuroscience at the Max-Planck-Institut für experimentelle Medizin in Göttingen, my home town. I enthusiastically took on the challenge, planned and oversaw the building of a new animal facility, hired scientists, and organized the renovations and equipment of a suite of laboratories. However, despite of strong local support, it soon became clear that the new leadership of the Max-Planck-Society, which had recently changed, developed doubts about my recruitment, and began rebuilding the institute that I was recruited into in directions that were quite different from what I had been told and what I had envisioned. In a personal discussion, Prof. Markl, then the president of the Max-Planck-Society, suggested I resign my position at the Max-Planck-Institut and look for a future in the US, which I did. I have never regretted my work for the Max-Planck-Institut in Göttingen, which laid the foundation for much of what happened there subsequently, including the recruitment of one of my postdoctoral fellows as a new director who has done a much better job than I could have done. However, I have also never regretted following the suggestion of the president of the Max-Planck-Society, and returning my attention and future to the US, where the breadth and tolerance of the system allowed me to operate in a manner that was more suitable for my somewhat iconoclastic temperament. Overall, my work as a director at the Max-Planck-Institut in Göttingen was a very positive experience that shaped my thinking when I subsequently had the opportunity to help build the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. Contributing to establishing a neuroscience department at Dallas was a lot of fun, and the free-flowing and unbureaurocratic environment of a state university was extremely supportive – it was a pleasure to hire young people, and see them develop! The currently final chapter in my career began when I moved my laboratory from UT Southwestern to Stanford University in 2008. After 10 years as a chair of a Neuroscience Center and then Department in Dallas, I felt that I wanted to devote more of my time to pure science, and to embark on a new professional direction, with an environment that was focused on academics. Moreover, I decided to redirect a large part of my efforts towards a major problem in neuroscience that appeared to be unexplored: how synapses are formed. Thus, in this currently last chapter of my life, I am probing the mechanisms that allow circuits to form in brain, and to form with often near magical properties dictated by the specific features of particular synapses at highly specified positions. I am fascinated by the complexity of this process, which far surpasses the numerical size of the genome, and interested in how disturbances in this process contribute to neuropsychiatric diseases such as autism and schizophrenia. This is what I would like to address in the next few years, hoping to gain at least some interesting insights. Throughout my career as an independent scientist, I have been generously supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the National Institute of Mental Health. I am grateful to both for their unflinching support. I have received several recognitions, all of them unexpected, among which I particularly cherish the Alden Spencer Award from Columbia University in 1993, the von Euler Lectureship from the Karolinska Institutet in 2004, and – of course – the Kavli Award in 2010. I am not sure I deserve any of these awards, as conceptual advances in science always represent incremental progress to which many minds contributed. The conceptual advances we made were no different in this regard, they do not constitute a single discovery of a particularly revolutionary method or phenomenon but a continuous postulation and testing of hypotheses. Moreover, our discoveries on how membranes fuse and how calcium regulates fusion would have been impossible without the coincidental findings by others, to whom I am grateful for their contributions. Finally, I feel indebted beyond words to my family, without which I would be barren and rudderless, and which has been more considerate of me than I deserve.

Tilda Swinton supportive of private Steiner schools Updated on thePublished 01/10/2013 10:38 TILDA Swinton today defended parents’ rights to opt out of state education in favour of the Steiner Waldorf education system which her own twin kids attend. The Oscar-winning star, who lives in Nairn, said an Oxford professor had told her that state education was so under question the top university “longed” for Steiner pupils who still have a love for learning. Swinton, 52, spoke out as she mixed with teachers, pupils and visitors at an open day for the Moray Steiner School and the recently-opened Drumduan Upper School in Forres, Moray. Ms Swinton, 52, is a trustee of both schools and a co-founder of Drumduan. Xavier and Honor, her 15-year-old children with artist John Byrne, are pupils at Drumduan. The London-born actress said promoting the schools, which take a holistic approach to education, is her only current project, adding that there was “a misunderstanding” about Steiner education as people think it’s ‘flaky’ or ‘woolly’. Ms Swinton, who won an Oscar for best supporting actress in 2008 for her performance as a ruthless corporate attorney in the legal thriller ‘Michael Clayton’, said: “When I went into the Steiner school for the first time, I was struck not only by the trusting and familial atmosphere for younger children, but mainly by older children, because I had never walked into a school before where teenagers had been so welcoming and self-possessed and kind. “The older children play with and care for the younger children. “There is, very often, a misunderstanding about Steiner education, because of the emphasis on the arts, and the children seem so carefree. “A misunderstanding that the education might be ‘woolly’ or ‘flaky. “As my children go through education, I am continually more impressed by how rigorous and engaged all the learning is.” She added: “I heard of a student who got a double first in physics from Edinburgh University, who said that all he was ever interested in was science and if he had an education other than Steiner then he would have been another ‘geek’ – unable to do anything other than his subject. “But through the Steiner system he had to learn other crafts. The Steiner had nurtured him to become a fully functional person. “The new upper school, which has only recently started here, has a 100 per cent success rate in placing students at universities, including Oxford and Cambridge. “A don at Oxford, who sits on the interview board for applicants, said that state education is so under question that they long for Steiner pupils who still have that love for learning. “Until Steiner education is taken on board by the government, it remains a private education.” Ms Swinton cut short promotion of her 2011 Oscar bid ‘We Need to talk about Kevin’ to do a cleaning shift at the Moray Steiner School. The mum-of-two jetted back from Spain to scrub floors and wash windows at the Forres school. Taking her role at the school very seriously, she said at the time: “There is a regular rota. “In order to keep the fees down it’s necessary for parents to take part in cleaning the school on a regular basis.” Steiner schools are based on the philosophy of Austrian philosopher Rudolph Steiner who founded the first in Germany in 1919. There are now 1026 independent Steiner schools across 60 countries. The schools concentrate on educating the “whole child” with a strong emphasis on creativity. The educational philosophy’s overarching goal is to develop free, morally responsible, and integrated individuals equipped with a high degree of social competence.

OFSTED inspectors find evidence that a later start to learning does not disadvantage pupils’ academic progress and achievement The recent section 5 OFSTED inspection of the Steiner Academy Hereford (July 2013) found that: ‘Pupils achieve well throughout the school, reaching above the expected levels in English and mathematics and in the other subjects that they take in Year 11, despite their later start with the formal teaching of such subjects.’ Their findings are borne out by the school’s GCSE results this summer: 80% of Year 11 pupils achieved 5 GCSEs (including maths and English) at grade C or above and almost half of the grades achieved were A or A*.

TOO MUCH, TOO SOON CAMPAIGN
We’re too young to fail

www.toomuchtoosoon.org
 The new SCM Early Years Education (EYE) Group has now been established and is launching its first major campaign to challenge the early years being seen primarily as a preparation for school, rather than a unique stage in its own right, together with what it sees as a succession of developmentally inappropriate policy interventions in the English approach. We are arguing that this issue is too important to get wrong and that policy-making should be be put in the hands of people who really understand the extraordinary learning capacities and developmental abilities of young children.
In the long-term the group would like to see the formation of a multi-disciplinary National Council on the Science of Child Development, similar to that established in the USA by Harvard University https://developingchild.harvard.edu/activities/council/about_the_council/. This body would aim to make the child’s best interests paramount and to bring an understanding of the science of early childhood and early brain development to political decision-making. We would also like to see the development of Child Wellbeing Impact Assessments for all new policies (in accordance with Article 3 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child).
The Campaign has just been launched with an Open letter that has been signed by 127 eminent academics, early years leaders and senior figures.  See the Open LetterSee the Press ReleaseSee the Comment Piece
The Telegraph has now run a poll on what age its own readers think is best with the following results. You can still participate in through the article page here.
Three 4.24%  (277 votes)  Four 7.15%  (467 votes)  Five 20.91%  (1,366 votes)  Six 38.57%  (2,520 votes)  Seven 29.13%  (1,903 votes)    Total Votes: 6,533
Sign the Petition and please help share this with others
Join the Day of Action on Weds 30th October!

Stand up for the Natural Developmental Rights of the Child
Put an end to developmentally inappropriate policy-making
Make your banners and book your coaches!

https://www.toomuchtoosoon.org/day-of-action.html
We are planning a sector-wide Day of Action for Wednesday 30th October and invite everyone to join us to show just how important we think these issues are. We will soon be providing resources such as posters and banners on the website but you can also make your own and promote your own related campaigns. We think it is only by coming together that we can really make a difference.
So whether you are a parent, childminder, playworker, early years teacher or headteacher, academic, lecturer, author or anyone else who really cares about the welbeing of children, please join us on the day. Let us know if you are coming though, especially if you are organising coaches, and we will share your details on the website.

Exeter Steiner School starts as new wave of schools open
Wednesday, September 04, 2013
Exeter Express and Echo
A “FREE” school in Exeter will be among the second wave of the coalition Government’s flagship education policy to open this week.
In total, 93 free schools are due to admit pupils for the first time this week, the Department for Education (DfE) said, bringing the overall number of open free schools to 174.
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They include the Steiner Academy in Exeter, two in Plymouth – the School of Creative Arts and the Marine Academy Primary – Sparkwell All Saints Primary on the outskirts of the city and Route 39 Academy at Higher Clovelly, north Devon.
The Steiner Academy will initially open in a temporary premises in Gloucester Road , while it intends to move to a permanent home in Thomas Hall, a former university halls in Cowley Bridge Road.
Free schools are semi-independent schools set up by groups including parents, teachers and charities. Of the 93 schools opening this month 35 are primaries, 42 are secondaries, 11 are all-age schools and five will cater for 16 to 19-year-olds.
When these schools are full, they will provide an extra 46,000 places for pupils, the DfE said.
Prime Minister David Cameron insisted that free schools “are one of the most important reforms to education in this country for a generation” and are “allowing people with a passion for giving children the best start in life to set up schools and making sure teachers in those schools have more freedom to do what they think is best”.
Education Secretary Michael Gove said these schools were “an integral part of the growing success story of state education in England”.
There are also 12 universal technical colleges (UTC) and 13 studio schools opening this term, including the Devon Health Studio in Torbay and UTC Plymouth.
From next September, Exeter University is to help open a new free school specialising in maths. The university will jointly run one of the government’s flagship free schools with Exeter College, with a fifth of pupils will be able to stay at the university between Monday and Thursday in a bid to attract youngsters from across the South West.
Cornwall already boasts a new private catholic secondary school at Camborne, called St Michael’s, a free school.
Free schools are established by groups including parents, teachers, faith groups and charities and have powers to decide how they spend their budgets and set their own curriculum, teaching hours and term-times. Teaching unions have claimed that they adversely affect neighbouring schools.
Read more: https://www.exeterexpressandecho.co.uk/Exeter-Steiner-School-starts-new-wave-schools/story-19745739-detail/story.html#ixzz2eNk8F7Sb
Follow us: @thisis_exeter on Twitter

There were lots of celebrations at Elmfield School in Oldswinford, Stourbridge, where a whopping 89 per cent of final year students picked up five or more A*s to C grades.
Students at the school in Love Lane follow the internationally renowned Steiner Waldorf curriculum.
They don’t do SATs and they sit their GCSEs over a two-year-period rather than at the end of a two-year GCSE course.
The school says it does not believe in “hot-housing” youngsters to achieve top results.
Instead it believes in “prolonging childhood” and education is “age-appropriate” with regular homework not introduced until pupils are 11.
Dudley News 22.8.13

Former Rudolf Steiner School student Bethany Woodward takes silver in T37 200m at World Championships
12:00pm Sunday 28th July 2013 in Sport
Picture: Action Images
Former Rudolf Steiner School student Bethany Woodward won a silver medal in the T37 200m at the IPC Athletics World Championships in Lyon on Monday.
Woodward’s time of 29.12 was a personal best and just 0.64 seconds behind the winner, Mandy Francois-Elie from France.
The 20-year-old, who has cerebral palsy and won silver and bronze medals at last summer’s Paralympic Games, came close to securing a second medal in the T37 100m but just missed out, finishing fourth in 14.43.
After winning the TE7 200m silver medal Woodward tweeted: “What a day! So proud silver and PB, thank you so much for all your lovely messages!” After missing out on a medal in the T37 100m she added: “Thank you so much for all your lovely messages, a great champs, would have loved that bronze but 4th in the world and it’s not even my event.”

Brien Masters
Many have been inspired by Brien Masters. His work, especially as a teacher educator enabled him to express the range of his talents – as musician, story-teller, raconteur and sage. A photograph of teachers at Michael Hall (in the 1950s, I believe) captured him as the image of a young Oxbridge graduate in tweedy jacket with the look of mildly bemused idealism. One could easily imagine such a young teacher featuring in a boarding school novel of the period, teaching Divinity and Latin perhaps and playing the organ for Sunday service. But Brien was far more complex than that and his many achievements are testimony to the range of his talents and to the intricacy of his character. In addition to working for many years at Michael Hall, he spent some time at Pottersbury Lodge School (a residential Steiner school for boys with special needs).
My first meeting with Brien took place at a conference for people working in (independent) Steiner home-schools for children with special needs. Brien gave a lecture on music which included many of his favourite stories. I remember being spell-bound by his humane authority and rich vein of humour. Later, I worked with him for as part of what was then called the “steering group” of the Steiner Schools’ Fellowship (Waldorf was added a little later). With the retirement of Ron Jarman, Brien became Chairman (definitely Chairman), taking his own idiosyncratic minutes in tiny handwriting, usually on large used brown envelopes, slit open along two side for the purpose. Not infrequently we only found out what Brien’s view of an issue was when the minutes appeared in typed form. He had very strong views, but tended to reserve their expression for a lengthy missive after the meeting. During this time he began to spread his interests internationally and, in typical style, gave an amusing and elaborate report as SWSF Chairman to a meeting of international Waldorf educators on his travels in South America and Israel (there was some puzzlement, as those attending were expecting a report about schools in the UK and Ireland!). Throughout, he continued to edit ‘Child and Man’, later re-titled ‘Steiner Education’, with the help of a small team of trusted collaborators. The magazine, partly funded by the Fellowship, was the longest running title of its type in Anthroposophical publishing, continuing even after its circulation began to wane (with the advent of electronic media): Brien had persistence! His retirement from the SWSF was not the happiest but enabled him to concentrate his energies on his increasing foreign visits and on developing the London Waldorf Teacher Training Seminar at Rudolf Steiner House, and for a time, the seminar at Michael Hall alongside it.
It is perhaps as a teacher trainer that Brien was able to expand into a role that fitted him as well as a good pair of gloves, or perhaps well-worn gardening gloves (he had extensive knowledge of wild and garden plants). Among the students his was a magisterial presence and he could often be seen at break-times engaged in intense conversation with an individual student. Having gained a doctorate during the time he worked for the Fellowship, Brien gave increasing attention to his writing, publishing several more books including ones on Mozart and Marie von Steiner-Sivers. His educational books, stories for children and the two ‘Waldorf Song Books’ are admired by many, But it was in leading a seminar and as pianist Brien seemed most at home with himself. His soul eased itself into the music he brought to life; his playing had a finesse and responsiveness (especially in accompaniment) that was worthy of some of the best exponents of the instrument and his composition was often very fine. He once said that he had never read Anthroposophical authors on music. He probably did not need to. Just as a superb performance of music continues to resonate with those who heard it long after the last notes have died away and grows richer in the memory, so too Brien’s contribution to Waldorf education.
Kevin Avison

Brien Masters died yesterday morning at 1.30 am.
There will be a memorial service held at Michael Hall School on Saturday 13th July at 8pm in the Eurythmy Studio.
Brien was for many years Chair of the Fellowship. He founded the London Waldorf Teacher Training Seminar. He wrote many books and lectured both here and abroad.

One of Devon’s first new free schools has been given the go-ahead to open at a former university hall of residence.
The Steiner Academy Exeter is expected to open at Thomas Hall on Cowley Road in 2015.
It is one of five free schools planned in Devon after the coalition government offered people the chance to open their own state-funded schools
Steiner schools offer an alternative to mainstream education and teach children through play and creative activities.
‘Big breakthrough’
The Exeter academy has been given approval for a permanent site at Thomas Hall by the Education Funding Agency. The amount of funding for the site has not yet been revealed.
The academy is due to open in temporary buildings in Gloucester Road, Exwick, in September and stay there while planning permission is sought.
Organiser Jenny Salmon said: “It’s a big breakthrough for us, it’s been a long process to get the site confirmed.”
The total number of pupils is expected to rise from 136 in September to 624 – aged four to 16 – in 2021.
Four other Devon free schools, Route 39 in Higher Clovelly, the Marine Academy in Plymouth, Sparkwell Primary near Plymouth and Plymouth School of Creative Arts, will also open in September.
Alan Swindell, principal designate of the Exeter academy, said: “We are delighted to have this opportunity to breathe new life into this beautiful building and site.
“It will be a wonderful environment for children, with tremendous scope for us to develop those aspects of our curriculum that really come alive in the great outdoors.”
Free schools have been criticised by some teachers as unnecessary and taking resources away from other state schools.
The government says each school is set up in direct response to demand from local people for a different or better school that will meet the needs of pupils in the community and help raise standards.

With great sadness we announce the closure of the Glasgow Steiner School after 25 years. Unfortunately they were unable to recover from the fire that gutted the school. We hope that in time there will be a new Steiner school in the area.