We now believe that the legal status of this Ministerial Assurance is of limited value in law, if any at all, and therefore may have no bearing on how Ofsted interpret the EYFS.

An EYFS exemptions process was revealed in July, but we were repeatedly told that this process was not intended for Steiner Waldorf schools.

Given that the EYFS is now in force and we are still uncertain as to how it will be applied to a Steiner Waldorf Kindergarten we have, with the help of a family from Alderbridge Steiner Waldorf school, begun to pursue a Judicial Review of the EYFS Exemptions regulations. There is an extremely short timescale for this to be effective - submission must be by 4th November 2008. A respected barrister who is SW educated is advising us, along with solicitors Leigh Day & Co. who will be handling the case. The details of the parents’ complaint is available here and makes interesting reading.

We remain concerned about the process for applying for exemptions from parts of the EYFS. We don’t believe that this will be a straight forward process, and it is vital that careful consideration is given to the merits of the exemptions process and to the quality of applications made. It is not yet clear where the exemptions would leave SW schools from a legal standpoint - it is not simply a case of applying to be exempt from all of EYFS Learning & development requirements - indeed this is impossible, as the educational programmes cannot be disapplied (only modified). It is also not at all clear whether or not schools may receive the exemption that they request.

We’ve arranged a conference with legal counsel to discuss (amongst other things) all the options for protecting Steiner Kindergartens. Janni Nicol and Sylvie Sklan have agreed to attend on behalf of The Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship. It is very likely that we will need to ask parents to contribute to the legal costs of investigating this matter and pursuing any legal action.

More news will be posted once we have had the conference on Thursday.

The text of our letter is available here.

Also, the campaign work has been in the news again. Armando Ianucci had a great comment on the EYFS situation in The Observer (Sunday March 2 2008). There was also coverage in the Times Education Supplement (TES) only available in paper form.

Graham Kennish also spoke excellently for the Open Eye campaign on Radio 4 on The Learning Curve on 25th Feb.

After such a long wait, we were hoping for something of substance. However, if you read the Wynstones letter and supporting documents, and compare it with the DCSF response, you will see that the government has completely failed to properly address any of the issues or questions raised. We have drawn up a document highlighting the problems with the proposed solution of exemptions for individual children.

The Wynstones parents campaign group is now looking into the option of challenging the government’s consultation process, and to this effect has instructed a lawyer, Kate Harrison, who successfully challenged a Government consultation on nuclear power on behalf of Greenpeace in 2007.

On 10th December 2007 Wynstones School sent a letter to the DCSF, requesting "a formal response… within the DCSF published timescale of 15 days."

As of 1st February 2008 (nearly two months later) there has been no response other than a two-line email thanking the school for its patience. Even if the DCSF published timescale refers to working days, the failure of the Department to respond adequately within more than twice its own published timescale is a cause for concern. The Wynstones kindergarten parents’ campaign team will be meeting shortly to discuss our next steps.

If you are a parent at a Steiner early years setting and have not yet contacted us, please do so at team@savesteinerschools.org and we’ll keep you up to date with the plan.

TES article

This Friday’s Times Educational Supplement includes a feature on the Wynstones campaign, and the possible effects of the EYFS on Steiner kindergartens on page 14 and an interesting article on unstructured play and brain development on page 36 of the accompanying TES Magazine.

Open EYE Petition

One of the Wynstones kindergarten parents was involved in drafting and posting a petition on the 10 Downing St website on behalf of the campaigning group Open EYE, asking for the learning and development requirements of the EYFS to be downgraded from statutory requirement to professional guidelines.

Already, out of over 8,000 petitions on the site, the Open EYE petition is the 45th most-signed. If you have not already done so, please sign it online here - it only takes a minute - and forward the link on to your friends. The more people who sign, the more difficult the issue will be to ignore!