It's the end of another school year. In September a new year will start. It will, as usual, be the same but different: the children will have moved up a class, some children will have moved from the kindergartens into a new Class 1, new children will have joined the kindergartens ... and as usual some families and their children will be leaving, and others joining, in mid-stream. But this year it's especially different as, for the first time in many years, another, longer, cycle comes full circle as Class 7 leaves us and Felix (Mister Brunner to the souls he has terrorised for the last seven years :-)) starts again with a new Class 1. This is something of an historic moment for us: it's only the second time we've had a Class 7 (the first, Class 6/7 in 2001-2002, went to Class 7/8 in 2002-2003) and the first time a single teacher has stayed with a class all the way through to this level.
We're perhaps also closer to coming full circle in respect of the Elephant In The Room that is the school's finances and its relationship to a certain large conurbation on its doorstep. In my webmaster's address a year ago I reflected on how, last year, we had avoided bankruptcy by the skin of our teeth. With a new government committed to austerity measures which will make many of us parents significantly poorer our school is probably not out of the woods yet. Financially we always seem to be sailing close to the wind, reliant on prodigious amounts of parental effort in fundraising, DIY and plain old hands-in-pockets; and we always seem to be short of the pupil numbers that would make us more comfortably viable. Currently, of the sixty-or-so children in the school and kindergartens, the number coming from Reading struggles to reach double-digits. Considering that the population of Greater Reading is almost a quarter of a million, compared to little more than 150,00 for the whole of West Berkshire, this suggests a wasted opportunity: there must be many more potential pupils in Reading, if we could reach them (and their parents). Earlier experience at AlderBridge suggests this is so: up until about 2000 we had not just parent & toddler groups but a thriving kindergarten at Christchurch Gardens in Reading (the first premises of the then Reading Steiner School Project, as the Alder Bridge Association was originally known), and when my firstborn, Jamie, started in Class 1 at AlderBridge about half of the class were ex-Christchurch Gardens children travelling in from Reading. CG has not had a kindergarten for most of the last 10 years, and has not even been running P&T groups since the building was sold to St Lukes in summer 2008. For the last few weeks, however, Lisa has been running (on behalf of St Luke's) her Applestar Parent & Child group in Caversham, and is about to move it to Christchurch Gardens. As I understand it the plan is to move towards running a kindergarten there in due course. With a full early years provision in Reading once more, AlderBridge could expect a significant increase in numbers of children progressing to the school itself, giving us greater financial stability and maybe the basis for us to eventually provide a full Steiner education for children all the way up to Class 12 or 13 in years to come. So let us welcome and do all we can to help promote Applestar's current venture!
John Stumbles, July 2010
