Waldorf School Bullying - old and new in recent testimony from Mumsnet

Thank you to the Stop Steiner in Stroud blog for bringing the updates to this older thread to my attention.  I'll count this as two new reviews.

From Mumsnet http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/education/a554507-steiner-school-scotland# 

AJMG Fri 07-Jun-13 18:57:53dear all - have not been on this website for some time but now find ourselves in the midst of a Steiner bullying situation in Scotland. See there has been a thread before and wondered if any of those involved are still here?

kaumana Sun 09-Jun-13 12:00:38

Have a look at the Local Edinburgh thread and you'll see that it is still a problem.

JaneGI Tue 06-May-14 19:25:40

Hope you don`t mind me writing on here but i have been thinking of this for that last few days. I was a child at a Steiner School in the 1970`s, bullying there was rife by Staff and Pupils alike, no one ever listened, no one ever stopped it, don`t know if i can go into it all because it is quite painful, but there was a girl in my class who was slightly different to everyone else because she had a medical condition that meant she was over weight.

One particular PE lesson, i don`t exactly know what happened because i wasn`t there that day, some other girls in the class went into the changing rooms, stripped her and put stinging nettles on her buttocks, nothing was done about it because the idea was it was her own fault.

I was a boarder there for some time and on regular occasions i had a boy come into my room at night who told me i would be dead in the morning. I also witnessed a teacher hit a child on the back of the neck so hard the child vomited. And witnessed another teacher drag a small girl by her hair along a path very hard because she didn`t want to go outside. I know this is an old thread but i just needed to tell some one. Thanks for reading.

Willow22 Sun 24-Aug-14 11:45:06

I've not read this thread before but just came across it. I noticed it was old and wasn't going to comment until I saw your message JaneGI. I'm so sorry to hear how bad it was for you and your fellow pupils in the 70s.

I hate to admit it now but we sent all three of our children to a Steiner school and we so regret the decision. My daughter was bullied both by the children and one of the teachers. My husband once arrived to collect her and found her soaking wet and covered in mud after being tipped into the local stream from a wheelbarrow. When he spoke to a teacher he was told she asked for it.

We don't know how it happened but even if she had volunteered to ride the wheelbarrow why didn't they clean her up and comfort her? She was bullied incessantly as were other children in her class and nothing was ever done. when she eventually became afraid to attend school we were asked to remove her because she was disrupting the class by not taking part in lessons!

My two boys did not experience this sort of thing but the level of education was really bad. The eldest left with two GCSEs, a C in Maths and a F in English and found college impossible to cope with yet he has an IQ in the gifted range. My younger son was asked to leave when we got into arreas with the fees after a lot of family problems incuding still having to cope with our daughter's ongoing mental health problems partly caused by her experiences at the school.

This is the school that is now a state funded academy and has received an £8,000,000 grant after the local education authority refused to help our children with their dyslexia due to a shortage of funding!