The principled principal: the case of Australian Steiner schools

Abstract

Purpose

Steiner schools represent a natural experiment in the provision of schooling. With a history dating back more than 100 years, leadership, leaders and the principal do not sit easily with Steiner educators. The contemporary regulatory environment requires a “principal” or legal authority at the school-building level, creating a tension for Steiner schools. This makes Steiner schools an ideal case study for understanding the contemporary role of the principal.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper is based on an interview-based study with 24 heads of Australian Steiner schools. Conducted on Microsoft Teams, all by the principal investigator, the interviews generated a 171,742-word corpus subjected to an inductive analytical approach. Data reduction led to four themes, and this paper focuses on one (principles not prescription) and its implications for the principalship and school governance.

Findings

Embedding the principalship in a philosophy (or theory) of education re-couples school administration with schooling and bases decision-making in principles rather than individuals. It also alters the role of data and evidence from accountability to justifying principles.

Research limitations/implications

Rather than a focus on individuals or roles, this paper argues that the underlying principles of organisational decision-making should be the central focus of research.

Practical implications

Ensuring organisational coherence, by balancing the diversity of positions on core principles is the core task of the contemporary principal.

Originality/value

Exploiting natural experiments in the provision of schooling makes it possible to argue for how schooling, and specifically the principalship, can be different.

Citation

Eacott, S. (2023), "The principled principal: the case of Australian Steiner schools", International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 37 No. 4, pp. 737-751. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEM-10-2022-0411

Introduction

The first Waldorf School was established in 1919 by Emil Molt (an investment capitalist) and Rudolf Steiner (an anthroposophist) in Stuttgart, Germany. It started with an enrolment of 256 students, 75% of whom belonged to workers at the Waldorf Astoria Cigarette factory and the remainder from families that were members of the local anthroposophical society. Within seven years, the Stuttgart school had over 1,000 enrolments and was one of the largest schools in the city (Ullrich, 1994 in Dahlin, 2017). From this single school, Steiner/Waldorf education has spread globally with the latest estimation indicating more than 1,300 schools and 2,000 kindergartens across more than 80 countries. Significantly, the first Waldorf School was known as Waldorf Freieschule, or Free School. Distinct from the “free school movement” (Neill, 1960), best captured in Summerhill (England), Steiner sought a provision of education that was free of state control, bureaucratic restraint, dogmatic ideology and open to accepting children from all social classes (Stehlik, 2019). These ideals generate a tension within contemporary school-based education – at least in Australia – where there is increasing state oversight, legal requirements for a single site-based authority (e.g. a principal) and a need for private expenditure (e.g. annual fees) to access Steiner education.

Steiner believed that schools are best organised based on collegiality. Ideally, organisational, and administrative questions should be decided on by the educators, what Steiner referred to as the College of Teachers (Dahlin, 2017). Therefore, in their traditional form, Steiner/Waldorf schools do not have a principal (headteacher, rector) as a formal head of the organisation, rather the College of Teachers (although College does have a chair). To support the work of the College, Steiner suggested that there should be weekly general meetings of all school staff to discuss administrative and other common concerns. These colloquia (Lehrerkonferenzen) were the spiritual and pedagogical heart of the school as an educational organisation (Steiner, 1986 [1923]). Instructional approaches and other teaching and learning matters are to be studied in the College of Teachers, including the sharing of practices. This idealised version of school design exhibits many of the practices advocated in contemporary school leadership (e.g. distributed leadership) and educator development (e.g. professional learning communities) literature with one significant difference – the absence of a principal.

Paradoxically, Steiner schools make a rich laboratory to further our understanding of the principalship. Notions of the leader, leadership or principal do not sit well with many Steiner educators (Moller, 2022). However, schools are relatively standardised bureaucratic workplaces with a principal (or various facsimiles) as organisational head and corresponding social and professional capital attached to the role. Foregrounding structural arrangements and decision-making responsibilities of the principalship has facilitated a decoupling of the administration of schooling and the practice of schooling. Drawing on an interview-based study with 24 heads of Australian Steiner schools the contribution of this paper is in re-casting the principalship. That is, rather than a focus on the individual, or a role, the principalship in Steiner schools is centrally concerned with constantly aligning activities with an overarching philosophy. Decision-making is principled based on a shared philosophy. In doing so, the principalship in a Steiner school is a context sensitive role embedded in and embodying a distinctive philosophy of education.

In the interests of reader clarity, it is important to stress what this paper is not. Put simply, this paper is not a “leadership” paper. As noted in the previous paragraph, the idea of leader and leadership do not sit well within Steiner education. Therefore, while the ontological complicity of educational leadership researchers may mean they read leadership into the discussion, this is more reflective of a pre-existing normative orientation than how participants have described the work of the principalship (Eacott, 2018). Analytically, the focus of this paper is on organisational form or the design of schools. The contribution of the paper is not to impose an external narrative (e.g. distributive or instructional leadership) on the words of the participants but to work with participant voice to better understand the principalship – or at least the legal requirement for a site-based authority – within schools based on a philosophy of education that is principal-less.

Background and context

After the First World War, there was a strong desire for social renewal and building society for the betterment of all. This was a period that saw the likes of John Dewey in the USA, Maria Montessori in Italy, Rudolf Steiner in Germany, and Alexander Sutherland Neill in England among others initiate experiments in the provision of schooling. In the case of Steiner, the first Waldorf school was considered a long-term societal investment in the education of the workers and aimed at creating a future generation who could be in a better position to create their own social forms (Dahlin, 2017). Remaining true to an anthroposophical lifestyle means prohibiting children from watching television, a general reluctance to engage with media technologies, preference for clothes of pure wool, bio-dynamically produced foods and resistance to vaccinations for childhood diseases (Dahlin, 2017). Many of these positions are considered poorly aligned with the contemporary world. At the same time, many families that seek out alternative education provision are looking for something unorthodox.

Describing what is, and what is not, a Steiner school has been an enduring issue for last 100 years. After all, Steiner never systematically articulated his position on education and instead it is scattered across lectures, essays and in many ways, built up through secondary analysis of his outputs (Dahlin, 2017). As part of a global effort at a unified position, the Hauge Circle – International Council for Steiner Waldorf Education – have articulated key characteristics of Waldorf education (Hague Circle, 2016). These concern context, identity, curriculum, internal-external relations, the artistic, the forms (schools and lessons), entrepreneurial health, community and governance. Built on a theory of child and teacher development constituted through notions of body, soul and spirit, Steiner schools integrate artistic and academic work and dissolve the boundaries between teaching and administration (Easton, 1997). Underlying Steiner philosophy is the pursuit of freedom, and that education focuses on the development of fully free human being, where schools should serve the child and not the state (Ashley, 2009). In the context of this paper, Steiner Education Australia (SEA), as a local organiser of Steiner education, has developed the Core Principles for Australian Steiner Schools (see Box 1 below). These core principles were released after the empirical work that informs this paper, but included here as background to understanding what constitutes Steiner education.

Box 1. Core Principles for Australia Steiner Schools

Version 1.0 June 2021.

1. The recognition of the unfolding spirit of each individual informs all aspects of the school.

2. Steiner/Waldorf education fosters social renewal by cultivating individuals who serve an ethical world future.

3. Anthroposophical insights into child development guide the educational program and practice.

4. Steiner/Waldorf schools support creative freedom to teach within the shared agreements of the schools' collegiate.

5. The conscious establishment of human relationships fosters individual and community health.

6. Spiritual development for sustaining professional growth is an ongoing activity for the collegiate of teachers and staff and is supported by the board.

7. Collaboration and shared responsibility provide the foundations of school leadership and governance.

Source: Steiner Education Australia

Not surprisingly, the SEA core principles align with broader principles of Steiner education that seek to meaningfully integrate teaching and administration in the form of the school. This is an important and distinctive feature of school design. Steiner sought a form of self-governing and self-managing schooling free of external (e.g. state) influence, rejecting of hierarchical systems of bureaucratic management (e.g. a principal and subordinates), and principally concerned with advancing the mission of Steiner/Waldorf education (Stehlik, 2019; Hague Circle, 2016). For the focus of this paper, it is Principle 3 and 7 that are of most interest. The integration of anthroposophical insights (Steiner's philosophy) as a guide for programs and practices (Principle 3) and the collective responsibility for school administration (Principle 7). It is noted that the SEA principles do use the label “leadership”, but this is arguably more an artefact of context-sensitive (Australian) language choices than a disruption in Steiner informed dialogue and debate as Moller (2022), CEO of SEA has written about the doubt and uncertainty of leadership and the principalship within the Australian Steiner context.

On a global scale, despite its lengthy history and global reach, there is a paucity of systematic research on Steiner/Waldorf education (Dahlin, 2017; Stehlik, 2019). There have been attempts to capture the scale and scope of literature (e.g. Gidley, 2010) and the establishment of an open access journal, Research on Steiner Education, however, there remains difficulties with bias in the literature (Dhondt et al., 2015). Issues of fidelity of implementation poses a problem for robust research designs (Tyson, 2021) and some insiders call into question the credibility of researchers to comment on Steiner/Waldorf education if they are not formally trained in the approach (Dahlin, 2017). As a result, there is an evidence void on the impact of a Steiner education.

Steiner schools in Australia

The first Steiner/Waldorf school in Australia, Glenaeon (Middle Cove, Sydney) was founded in 1957 (Stehlik, 2019). Matching international trends, greater expansion of Steiner schooling followed in the 1970 and 1980s (Bak, 2018, 2021). Based on the Steiner 2021: Curating contemporary education report (Eacott and Munoz Rivera, 2021), there are 47 Steiner schools enrolling 9,417 children and youth throughout Australia. Despite 44.5% growth since 2008, Steiner schools remain on the periphery of Australian education, representing only 0.23% of all enrolments. In addition, those enrolled in Steiner schools are less likely than national averages to identify as Indigenous (4.6% compared to 10.3), from a Language Background Other Than English (14.4% compared to 23.2), and not surprising given their non-government status, the mean socio-educational advantage of schools (M = 1,071, SD = 34.1) is above the national mean (1,007), raising questions about the alignment with Steiner's intent of being open to students from all classes. The Australian Steiner Curriculum Framework has been assessed as equivalent to the Australian National Curriculum, but low rates of participation in national testing schemes (22% compared to 95% national average), makes it difficult to assess how well the school are performing. However, with growth in enrolments, a nationally equivalent curriculum, and allegiance to an approach that has been in existence for over 100 years, Steiner schools are a natural experiment (Sieweke and Santoni, 2020) in the provision of schooling and offer potentially fruitful insight into the principalship.

The principalship and the grammar of schooling

The principalship has been a central focus of explanatory and empirical significance in educational administration studies since their inception (e.g. Payne, 1875; Wolcott, 1973; Dinham et al., 2018). There are longstanding research programs such as the International Successful School Principals Project (e.g. Day, 2022), and considerable attention to the preparation of future principals (Heffernan and Pierpoint, 2022) primarily on the evidence that principals are important for school outcomes (Cruz-González et al., 2021; Kılınç and Gümüş, 2021; Snodgrass Rangel, 2018). Put simply, the principalship is central to the grammar of schooling – the organisational and pedagogical forms of schooling that have persisted over time and proved resistant to efforts to reform them (Tyack and Tobin, 1994). The generic organisational structure, mirroring public administration and industry, with the principal at the top of building-level roles has proven incredibly durable over space and time. The technical superiority of a single organisational head and chains of command has worked well for schools and systems on a global scale. Attempts to de-couple roles (e.g. the principalship) from practices (e.g. leadership) have done little to change the underlying logic or generative assumptions of how schooling is organised at the building-level.

A key design challenge for contemporary organisations is confronting the limitations of the classic management hierarchy and the need for a radical rethinking of organisational design (Foss and Klein, 2022). This requires weaving intra-organisational structures based on formally defined roles and responsibilities and the repeated patterns of interactions between organisational members (Hunter et al., 2020). While replacing traditional top-down hierarchies has been steady, it has been a very slow process (Billinger and Workiewicz, 2019). Steiner schools have been identified as disruptions to the traditional grammar of schooling (Mehta and Datnow, 2020). Removing the principalship, as Steiner did in his original school structure, distorts the linearity of supervision in an orthodox organisation and introduces greater risk of dysfunction through variance, inefficiencies and miscommunications within the organisation.

Rather than seeking to design the organisation of the future, as is contemporarily popular (Burton et al., 2020), Steiner was concerned with designing schools to deliver on his desired form of education – a vehicle for advancing an anthroposophical approach to life. For the contemporary principalship, this requires attention to the increasing complexity of the role and the dynamics of regulations and policy (Tintoré et al., 2022), but balanced with the principles of Steiner education. This is no easy task. Over a century ago, Dewey (1902) warned that it is “easy to fall into the habit of regarding the mechanics of school organization and administration as something comparatively external and indifferent to educational ideals” (pp. 22–23). If Steiner's approach is a test for the grammar of schooling, what remains unknown is how the philosophy – or theory of education – intersects with contemporary schooling and its cascading effect on the principalship. To deliver such insights requires research that does not simply use Steiner schools as an empirical site for projects (e.g. Carey et al., 2022), but explicitly focuses on establishing causal claims based on schooling using Steiner's philosophy.

The project and analytical approach

This paper draws from a larger research program entitled Building education systems for equity and excellence[1] which is centrally concerned with the question of “how do we organise education to get the outcomes we desire?” The program currently has four key work packages: (1) snapshots of provision, (2) empirical models of school system design, (3) building alternative indicators for schooling and (4) social returns on education. This paper reports on an iteration of work package one being conducted in partnership with SEA. Specifically, it draws on an interview-based study with 24 heads of Australian Steiner schools. The focus of this paper is what it is like to be a contemporary principal in an Australian Steiner school.

The 24 interviews ranging from 44 to 68 min were conducted on Microsoft Teams (due to pandemic public health restrictions) in May–June of 2021, all by the principal investigator, and generated a 171,742-word corpus. A single interview with school heads, especially when reaching greater than 50% of schools, is appropriate for the work package as in combination with official data on school profiles (as reported in the background section), there is sufficient evidence to build a rigorous and robust set of claims on what it is like to be a contemporary principal in an Australian Steiner school. This is particularly so if a robust justification of the sample size for analytical purposes can be demonstrated – a matter returned to shortly. In addition, analysis of field norms in educational administration and leadership studies would reveal that most interview-based studies are single interview, often although not always, supplemented with other data generation approaches (see Thomson, 2017).

Analytically, an inductive approach was taken centring on three key questions: (1) what it is like to be the head of a contemporary Steiner school, (2) how that plays out in practice and (3) what are the problems and possibilities for Steiner school-based education in Australia? Through an initial round of analysis 102 nodes were identified. In collating this data, the 102 nodes represented 31 unique codes with the same or similar issues coming up in multiple interviews. These 31 unique codes grouped into 12 areas best captured in four themes: principles not prescription, distinctions not difference, contemporary pedagogy and enduring issues. As this paper is focused on the form or design of schools and in particular the principalship, it is the first theme (principles not prescription) and its implications for the principalship and school governance that is central to the argument. Providing analytical adequacy to the relevance of Steiner pedagogy for the contemporary world, and the enduring issues of financial viability and staff qualifications would dilute the focus of the paper or require a word count well beyond the limits of a single journal article in International Journal of Educational Management. As such, these matters will be pursued elsewhere.

Justifications of sample size in interview-based studies are under-reported in educational administration and leadership research. Power analysis prior to commencing research is difficult to establish and post-data generation analysis targeting saturation is frequently used as the conceptual benchmark for assessing sampling adequacy. Working with a technique developed by Guest et al. (2020) focused on base size, run length and new information threshold, below is transparency in the justification of the sample size of this paper (see Figure 1).

Existing research indicates that novel information is secured in a relatively small number of interviews with a rapid decline in new information from that point. To establish data saturation requires a calculation of the volume of new information against an initial base of information. A fundamental question is how many interviews should constitute this base size (the denominator for the saturation ratio calculation). Run length is the number of interviews within which new information is sought. The number of unique codes within a run length defines the numerator in the saturation ratio. The new information threshold is the degree of new information accepted as indicative of saturation.

Taking into consideration suggestions from Guest et al. (2020), and a parallel study with Montessori school leaders (Eacott and Wainer, 2023), analysis was run using multiple base sizes (4, 5 and 6) and run lengths (2 and 3), and appropriating benchmarks for assessing p-values (<0.05 and < 0.01) as proxies for new information thresholds. Given the heterogeneity of the schools (within the parameters of the single Australian Steiner identifier) to allow for maximum variation a base size of 6 was chosen, with a run length of 2 and reporting at both <0.05 and < 0.01 as new information thresholds. Figure 2 displays this model. While it does not necessarily guarantee data saturation, it provides transparency in decisions and can be interpreted by other researchers.

As shown in Figure 2, the new information threshold reaches <0.05 at 10 interviews and <0.01 at 13 interviews, both well within the 24 completed. At 10 interviews 81% of unique codes are included, and at 13 interviews coverage includes 87%. This analysis justified the sample of 24 interviews as more than adequate for the claims being made.

Stylistically, in consultation with the sponsor, it was decided due to the small population that rather than pseudonyms participants were assigned a number (based on interview order). Two approaches are taken to including participant voice or contribution in the findings. First, there is the inclusion of direct quotes or phrases from participants. These are indicated in quotation marks followed by the participant number in brackets. Second, to avoid identification through idiosyncratic phrasing (as identified during research partner pre-reading of the manuscript) or where multiple participants have made the same or similar claim these have been para-phrased or aggregated in-text. Where this takes place, participant identification is included at the end of the sentence (e.g. para-phrased material [Participant 1]). Such an approach is appropriate for this research given the small size of the Steiner community, but also allowing for significant participant voice – including the intensity of issues – to still be present while simultaneously protecting participants' identity.

Findings

The idea of leadership and leaders, those which have come to dominate educational administration and leadership studies, is an ill-fit in Steiner schools. Their very existence is perceived as creating a hierarchy among school staff, and something Steiner sought to explicitly avoid in his design of schooling. As Participant 19 noted, “getting leadership sorted out is a really big thing” as many schools have “issues with disputes between boards, principals, and the College of Teachers” over organisational decision-making. The primary point of conflict is the respect for individual freedom in Steiner philosophy and the perceived decision-making authority of the principal or organisational head. However, a huge part of administration and the organisation of work is “bringing people along with you” [Participant 19] and “it is not one person at the top making all the decisions” [Participant 11]. What is distinctive in Steiner schools is that “decisions made need to align with the Steiner philosophy” [Participant 01]. This generates a threshold question for those in schools. Put simply, the threshold question is “Does this potential course of action align with Steiner's philosophy?” It is this question which defines the distinction between Steiner and other forms of education.

The principalship and governance of Steiner schools

The principalship, as a legal requirement, in a Steiner school is in a web of relations with a School Board (which can be constituted by families at the school or externally sought members), the College of Teachers and in some cases, professional or administrative staff focused on the business side of running a school. While not necessarily distinct from other non-systemic school governance, it is the Steiner philosophy (the threshold question) that is novel about these structural arrangements.

The principalship

Not all Steiner schools have a formal role labelled as principal. Other labels used include “educational administrator”, “director”, “manager” or “head of school”, but for an external audience (particularly for accreditation purposes), principal has the greatest utility [Participants 01, 07, 16, 17 and 19]. Although some perceive the idea of the principal as “not consistent with Steiner's philosophy of self-administered schooling” [Participant 18] the contradiction of Rudolf Steiner himself being in many ways the principal of the first Steiner school is not lost on all [Participants 08 and 11]. Significantly, at least for trying to understand the implications for conceptualisations of organising the work of a school, the presence of a principal does not necessarily negate “the possibility of participatory approaches decision making” [Participant 22].

The regulatory environment of contemporary Australia, as with elsewhere, is very different from Stuttgart in 1919 [Participants 05 and 07]. Government oversight and compliance require someone to be named as the legally responsible site manager for a school irrespective of the title used [Participants 01, 03 and 04]. Within these requirements, there is the possibility to use non-educators in the role. The presence of the College of Teachers further enables non-educators as principals but does set up a potential decision-making tension. Whether an educator or not (and almost all are), the presence of a College of Teachers and a Board re-cast the principalship from the decision-maker to one focused on enabling the conditions necessary to deliver the highest quality Steiner education. The core work of the principalship is stewardship or curation of the Steiner philosophy – the advancement of the anthroposophical mission – not necessary education. While not mutually exclusive, they are not the same either. Balancing this task while working productively with the College of Teachers and Board is the greatest challenge for principals [Participants 01, 04, 14 and 17].

The school board

Many Steiner schools grew out of the efforts of a small number of people or families within a community. This can create a tension between what was “needed to get a school established and what is required to keep a school running” [Participant 22]. The initial energy and commitment (which often include financial as well as time) creates a heightened sense of ownership and purity in the schools which many seek to sustain even as the school grows and expands. However, in the contemporary regulatory environment, Steiner schools are not community schools. At an aggregate level, they receive a greater portion of their annual income from public funds than private expenditure such as fees [Participant 03]. The matching accountability means there is a business component to running a school.

… parents are not fond of [financial viability talk] because they do not like the business aspect of the school. They think we should be more benevolent, more like a charity. But I say we are not for charity. Even though we are not-for-profit it does not mean we should be operating at a loss every year. At some stage we would run out of resources and that does not make sense if you want to have a viable school. We have dreams, we have plans, but we do need to finance them.

Participant 18

As relatively small independent operations (average enrolment is 199, SD = 139, median = 162), one of the greatest risks to the functionality of Steiner schools are the “relations between staff, parents, and the board” [Participant 08]. Synergy among board members, and the board's support for the work of the school is foundational to effective operations. This is very much shaped by the composition of the board and the knowledge, skills and attitudes they bring to the role. Apart from lack of experience or understanding of what it takes to run a viable operation, there is a perception that “some parents seek board roles for personal reasons” [Participant 08] that have little to do with “representing the parent or community body” [Participant 15]. This type of action can undermine not just the board but also the work of the school when individual intentions over-shadow the needs of the collective. Tending to and nurturing the collective, especially expertise based (e.g. the College of Teachers), is fundamental to Steiner's philosophy.

College of Teachers

A College of Teachers is core to Steiner education. The idea of a “group (or even all) teachers engaging with one another in democratic decision-making, study, and sharing of practice is a key cultural attribute of a Steiner school” [Participants 01]. College meetings are an opportunity to be part of something bigger. A nurturing environment where staff look at what they are “bringing to the students and learning” from the collective [Participant 21]. It creates, and sustains, “a sense of collective responsibility” for the teaching and learning that takes place at the school and that of every student [Participant 15].

The College of Teachers is however problematic in some schools. Not so much the idea, but the enactment. Despite claims of discomfort with hierarchy in Steiner education, the College – if exclusionary and only a select group of teachers – “potentially establishes a hierarchy within the school” [Participant 06]. The approach of having “elders or experts, some self-appointed” can hinder dialogue and debate within a school and even the College [Participant 01]. This is not to say that College operates that way in all schools, nor to discredit the role it plays within Steiner schools, but it is not beyond critique. It can be “inclusive and encouraging of growth for all” [Participants 06 and 21] but can become a power base and source of clashes with principals and boards.

The business of running a school

Supporting the work of schools as financially viable operations, many Steiner schools have various iterations of business or operations managers’ roles. These roles are distinct from education-focused positions and intended to support the development of the school. These roles are often fundamental during “periods of growth (including establishment) and major capital expenditure” [Participant 03]. While not explicitly focused on the education of students, these roles are crucial to the ongoing provision at the school and sustainment of a culture that is “collaborative and always child-focused” [Participant 19]. Understanding and appreciating the role played by these key administrative positions is “crucial to smooth operations” [Participant 03] but only possible with “clear demarcation of roles” [Participant 06]. The “volume of regulation and compliance required” of contemporary schools makes the “Steiner ideal of self-administering educators untenable” [Participant 18].

Principles of Steiner schools

While sharing a commitment to a particular philosophy, Steiner schools throughout Australia are a collective rather than a single system. There is “great diversity” of approaches ranging “from traditional through to progressive” [Participant 01]. All schools have their “own unique histories, contexts, and engagements with Steiner” [Participant 06]. Courtesy of a commitment to free education, apart from an underlying philosophy of anthroposophy, what it means to be a Steiner-inspired school ends up with “its own interpretation at both a school and individual level” [Participants 03 and 11]. This can create confusion as to what is, and just as importantly what is not, Steiner-inspired education. SEA's Core Principles for Australian Steiner Schools offer an articulation of the minimum threshold principles of a Steiner school, potentially protecting the label from being exploited for personal, professional or commercial gain, but may also prove exclusionary and “dismissive of those deemed not Steiner enough” (Participant 14, emphasis added by researcher).

Almost all participants made some reference to claims of “that is not Steiner” being invoked to stop reforms or dismiss the practices of others. This brought Participant 01 to query whether “Steiner is a philosophy guiding the work of schools or is it a belief system?” Any attempt to impose a single version of what Steiner should be is “undesirable for schooling which aims to advance individual growth and creative freedom” [Participant 11]. It is the principles without prescription that matter. Steiner schools have a reputation in the community as an “alternative education” [Participants 01, 04, 14 and 21], and the people who seek them out are “looking for something different” [Participants 15 and 19]. Participant 17 noted that “we are not driven by test results”, and Participant 21 adds, “we let students steer, which means sometimes they do not do that well [in end of school examinations], but they do something that they love.” This creates a challenge for principals. There is a need to “understand and be able to articulate what they do” [Participant 03 and 07] and most importantly, justify those actions against principles that go beyond any given situation.

Discussion

Contemporary Steiner school-based education exists in a state of constant contradiction. An enduring issue is balancing the internal tension for differentiation of provision in the pursuit of freedom – fundamental to Steiner's philosophy – and external pressure to standardised what is Steiner education – to establish what is, and is not, Steiner education. Loyalty, often uncritical, to the lineage going back to 1919 Stuttgart while seeking to appeal to contemporary children, youth and families is no easy task and organisational viability is at stake. Maintaining sufficient enrolments and capital to sustain activities is imperative. Attracting and retaining enrolments is dependent on the appeal and coherence of the distinctive approach of the schools. Based on the interview data generated with school heads, three factors arise from this context: the importance of the threshold question, principle-based decision-making and the shifting evidence requirements.

Steiner schools have been around for over 100 years (Stehlik, 2019; Dahlin, 2017) and have been identified as a disruption to the grammar of schooling (Mehta and Datnow, 2020; Tyack and Tobin, 1994). For principals, the threshold question of “Does this potential course of action align with Steiner's philosophy?” is fundamental to their work. This question explicitly concerns the enduring integrity of Steiner's principles, and its distinctive place in the provision of schooling. The threshold question alone is not enough. It needs to be supported by two tests, one of legitimacy and the other of strength. With regards to legitimacy, the question is whether actions are aligned with agreed accounts of Steiner's principles. The Core Principles for Australian Steiner Schools provides the criteria for which activities can be judged as aligned with the philosophy. The measure being whether proposed activities are consistent with the core principles? It is a bounded outcome, ranging from no [0] to yes [1]. The test of strength concerns the how Steiner are the proposed activities. There is no upper limit to this measure [0, ∞] as actions can arguably always be more Steiner-informed. The two tests are not mutually exclusive, but they are not the same either. In combination with the threshold question, and the systemic infrastructure (e.g. the core principles), the tests of legitimacy and strength provide the basis for principled decision-making in the design of schooling. For the principal, this work de-centres the decision-maker (as an individual or a role) and makes the philosophy, and advancement of anthroposophical mission of central importance – consistent with Steiner's intent (Dahlin, 2017; Stehlik, 2019; Steiner, 1986 [1923]).

Due to the ill-fit of “leadership” rhetoric in Steiner education (Moller, 2022), it is not surprising to see Steiner schools move beyond person- or role-centric approaches to organising provision. The threshold question and sub-tests articulated in the previous paragraph are the foundations for principled decision-making. The internal school infrastructure of the College of Teachers provides organisational support for adhering to Steiner's philosophy (Dahlin, 2017; Steiner, 1986[1923]), and the systemic infrastructure of the Core Principles for Australian Steiner Schools provides a between-school fail safe for the integrity of the distinctive approach at scale. In short, the principalship and governance approach of Steiner schools has overcome traditional limitations of organisational hierarchy (Foss and Klein, 2022) and slow changes processes (Billinger and Workiewicz, 2019) to embed the necessary checks and balances to minimise within- and between-school variance in the provision of Steiner education. This does not mean there is no variance across schools, rather it is alignment with principles rather than prescription that grants them their identity. None of the checks and balances are dependent on a single individual, role or formal training. Instead, principled not person- or role-centric decision-making weaves responsibility through the repeated interactions of organisational members (Hunter et al., 2020).

Being philosophically centred, Steiner education re-casts the relationship of schools and data. Recent decades have witnessed schools becoming awash with data. Data points are often externally established and imposed on schools as part of public accountability requirements. For Steiner schools an alternative is imperative. As an alternative provider, the schools make some claims to delivering non-traditional outcomes derived from their guiding philosophy. This generates both a problem and a possibility. As Ladwig (2010) notes, if you can claim something, you can translate it into school-based programs with matching data points that cumulatively become evidence as to whether you deliver on the espoused claims. The long-run impacts of Steiner's (and many others) approach to schooling are currently unknown. There have been attempts to post-hoc identify graduate outcomes in Australia – New Zealand (Haralambous and Carey, 2021), Germany (Barz et al., 2012), Sweden (Dahlin, 2007) and the USA (Baldwin et al., 2005; Safit et al., 2019), but they lack causal explanation. The principles establish the basis for data generation in Steiner schools. Principals need to oversee the generation of evidence (which can take many forms) to support claims of what the school delivers. In other words, evidencing the type of education the schools espouse they deliver. This evidence closes the loop between guiding philosophy, activities undertaken and their impact or effect. In addition, the data and evidence serves as the basis for decisions regarding what is done, and equally important what is not, with regards to delivering a Steiner education. It is not about getting better using externally imposed criteria for success, but organisational coherence with the espoused philosophy guiding the work of the school. It is principle-based work.

In sum, Steiner's philosophy grants clarity through principles without prescribing exactly how schooling should be, gives rise to organisational coherence through alignment with those principles, and generates a basis for evidencing the impact of schooling. It is through the clarity and coherence that principals curate the narrative of Steiner schools. A narrative of the development of fully free human beings.

Limitations

The current study should be interpreted within the constraints of several limitations. First, despite the use of official government data on school profiles, the primary data source was self-reporting interviews with the organisational heads of schools. Although this is an appropriate means for generating data on what it is like to be a principal in a contemporary Steiner school, it will be important to conduct further research from a greater breadth of data sources (e.g. educators, students, community members and professional associations). This is especially important if the goal is to generate a suite of alternative indicators for Steiner schooling that could be used in natural experiments to develop empirically defensible claims on the impact of the philosophically driven approach to education has on student outcomes. A practical, or knowledge translation, strength of the present work is that it provides Steiner educators and the broader Steiner community with a basis from which to build a collective and distinctive context-sensitive narrative of their impact.

Conclusion

Steiner/Waldorf education in Australia and globally is on the margins. Research focused on peripheral providers often romanticises the charismatic leader who raises outcomes or the profile of schools/approaches. This does little to advance our understanding of the attributable distinctions in provision as it focuses on individuals (or groups) and arguably externally imposed outcome measures. The argument put forward in this paper is that rather than individuals or roles, it is the underlying generative principles of the approach – in this case Steiner – that is of central importance. The principalship is built on principles of the approach, and the primary task is curating education that is consistent with those principles. In doing so, ideology is moved aside and decision-making appeals to principles that transcend the immediate situation. It is coherence with the espoused philosophy of the school that matters most.

While contemporary schools, particularly those receiving public funding (even if partial), will never be entirely free of state control and bureaucratic restraint, internal administrative and governance structures and grounding decision-making in principles of practice makes it is possible to embed collegiality in school organisation as Steiner sought. This argument is equally applicable in other types of schools and educational institutions. The need for clarity of the principles of practice and delivering coherence in decision-making and activities enables schools to tell their own story rather than being judged on the criteria imposed by others. Such a goal is deceptively transferable. For school principals, in both Steiner schools and others, their work is all about principles. The explicit argument of this paper concerns the re-coupling of education and its administration. A claim for not just the embedding but the embodying of a philosophy of education in the principalship. An argument that few in education would refute.

Figures

Figure 1

Data reduction process

Figure 2

Data saturation assessment, base size 6 and run length 2

Note

1. See: https://www.unsw.edu.au/arts-design-architecture/our-schools/education/our-research/flagship-projects/building-education-systems-for-equity-and-excellence