MADAM - Ref: Every child wins overall with more school choices.

I welcome the idea of parents being able to have another choice of school to send their kids to.

I don’t really get why having a Steiner Academy as a potential choice of school is so problematic to a handful of people once the bigger picture is considered and the details put aside.

If it is approved it will be state-funded — so, in effect, it will be a state school.

That’s what Germany has done. They have state-funded their Steiner schools and they have a larger portion of Steiner schools across the country than the UK does.

They also have a higher overall standard of educational achievement, so that seems a pretty good model to follow to me.

If the Steiner Academy goes ahead and is not successful it will simply fail. Nice try, end of story.

If it is successful, it will be successful because it is providing a better education to some children.

That in turn will raise the bar for all local schools and so the overall standard of education will improve in all schools — so from a parental perspective every child wins by having this competition.

The choice of schools is wider and the quality of education provided will be forced upwards.

I have no vested interest in this. By the time the Steiner Academy is running my children will be too old to join anyway (shame the choice didn’t exist earlier).

My children are currently in a local state secondary school as private education is not an affordable option for me right now; this is despite me having been privileged enough to attend a Steiner school myself, to which I am truly grateful.

I wish the pioneers of this Steiner Academy every success in bringing a wider choice of education to all Stroud area parents.

Adrian Lawton, BSc MSc

Stroud