Titirangi Rudolf Steiner School


Titirangi Rudolf Steiner School is a privately funded school with a special character, a Waldorf school located in Auckland, New Zealand
A co-educational, non-denominational and independent education for children aged birth to eighteen based on the educational philosophy of Rudolf Steiner.
Titirangi Rudolf Steiner School provides a comprehensive Waldorf education Curriculum and environment which encourages and promotes independent thinking and social responsibility. The School understands children as beings of body, soul and spirit and guides them to develop compassion and reverence for themselves and the world community through realising their social, academic and artistic potential.
The unique gifts and contributions of each child are honoured through a developmentally appropriate awakening of thinking, feeling and willing as indicated by Rudolf Steiner.
Since the school’s motto includes “to nurture truth”, it’s important that prospective parents are aware of certain aspects.
The philosophy this school's pedagogy is based on is riddled with pseudoscientific notions such as demons, angels, karma, and racism.
Further, this Steiner Waldorf school has a reputation in the local area, which spans decades, of unchecked bullying.
Many testimonials have been gathered about this going all the way back to the 1980s, and includes the personal and evidential experience of a family who had to take the school to Human Rights mediation. This happened because the school expelled their then 8 year old daughter and her siblings without warning, rather than deal with the bullying she had been regularly suffering from for months. This culminated with her being threatened by a then 10 year old boy with an axe.
In the legally binding mediation settlement, the school admitted that the bullied child's accounts were honest, ie, that she had told the truth about the accounts of bullying.
Sadly, unchecked bullying is a common complaint of Waldorf Schools worldwide

Location

It is located on a site of over 29 hectares in West Auckland's Waitākere Ranges.

Demographics

According to the 2018 Education Review Office report the school had 179 pupils out of which 18 were international. Out of those, 58% were female and 42% were male. The racial markup was 79% Pākehā, 4% Māori, 12% Asian, 3% Pacific and 2% of other races. ERO also found that the school meets the registration as a private school criteria.
The school's Kindergarten was reviewed separately by ERO who stated that 80% of teachers there were qualified. When it came to demographics, they were slightly different from the main school. The Titirangi Rudolf Steiner Kindergarten 1 had 53 pupils at the time of a review, 28 of which were male and 25 female. Out of those, 40% were Pākehā, 3% were Māori, 2% were Japanese, 6% of European descent and 2% were of other races.