Follow the child
Work is chosen from shelves prepared for exactly where a child is.
Watch them
bloom.
A prepared room where curiosity leads and the garden does half the teaching.A prepared room where curiosity leads, the Cambridge Pathway keeps the score, and the garden does half the teaching.
- 8:1
- Children per adult
- 18
- Nationalities
- 2 acres
- Garden and forest
- 8
- Year groups
Across every classroom
In a school of 210
Used every single day
Foundation 1 to Primary 5
Our approach
Built around the child, not the timetable
Children arrive already trying to learn. Almost everything we do is designed to keep out of the way of that, and to notice the moment a child is ready for more.
One class, one teacher, all year
Small year groups, and a teacher who knows every child in the room.
Nature is the third teacher
Two acres of garden, orchard and forest sit outside every door.
Programme levels
A class for every age
Eight year groups from three to eleven, in two stages, all of it on the Cambridge Pathway.
3 – 6 years
Early Years
- Foundation 1
- Foundation 2
- Reception
Three years to learn how school works before anyone asks them to sit an assessment. The room is low-shelved and the day is mostly chosen, but the ground being covered is the Cambridge Early Years framework: communication, early mathematics, and understanding the world.
Learn more
6 – 11 years
Primary
- Primary 1
- Primary 2
- Primary 3
- Primary 4
- Primary 5
Five years on the Cambridge Primary framework: English, mathematics, science, global perspectives and digital literacy. One class, one teacher, and a long uninterrupted morning that does not get chopped into forty-minute lessons.
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A day at Eco-Bloom
What actually happens all day
No bells. One long, unhurried morning, and an afternoon with paint on it.
Arrival at the gate
Children hang their own coats, change their own shoes and say good morning to a guide who is at their height.
The three-hour work cycle
The heart of the morning. Children choose their work and stay with it for as long as it holds them, and nobody rings a bell to interrupt concentration.
Outside, whatever the sky is doing
The garden, the orchard, the compost heap and the mud kitchen. Boots on, questions out.
Lunch, laid and cleared by the children
Tables set with real crockery, food passed around, conversation in four languages, and the washing-up done by the people who ate.
Latest news
What has been happening lately
Harvests, building work, training, and the occasional escaped tortoise.
- Garden
Harvest week ended with 40kg of tomatoes
Primary 5 weighed, sorted and sold the crop at the gate, then did the bookkeeping themselves.
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- Campus
The new atelier opens in September
A dedicated room for clay, woodwork and messy paint, built where the old storeroom used to be.
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- Cambridge
Primary 5 sat their Checkpoint in May
Externally marked, and the reports went home last week. Here is what they do and do not tell you.
Read more
In their own words
Families who stayed
No brochure line has ever convinced a parent. Another parent has.
Film coming soon
We moved here worried she would fall behind. Six months in she was teaching her little brother long division with beads on the kitchen floor.
Testimonial 1 of 3: Ngozi Adeyemi
A word from our principal
Curiosity is the whole curriculum
We are not preparing children for the next school year. We are preparing them to be curious for the rest of their lives.
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Parents ask me what makes a Montessori child different. The honest answer is that it takes a few years to see, and then it is obvious: they know how to begin something without being told to.
That is the whole of it. Everything we build here, the prepared rooms, the long uninterrupted mornings, the garden, exists to protect a child's own reason for starting.
Accredited by and working with
- AMI
- CIS
- Eco-Schools
- KPTF
- GFES
- WAMN
Come and visit us
Tours are Tuesday and Thursday, 9am, while the children are working.