HEREFORDSHIRE’S pioneering Steiner Academy is finally set to spread its wings as workmen start on a £5.1 million expansion project.

More than 300 pupils will see mobile classrooms and Much Dewchurch’s old village school give way to a new music room, a woodwork room and their first school hall over the next 18 months.

Its marks a new era for the former Waldorf School, which became the UK’s first state-funded Steiner Academy last September, 25 years after parents and teachers created an independent alternative education centre there in 1983.

Principal Trevor Mepham, appointed following a £10 million cash injection from the Government, said: “Obviously it’s quite exciting to have got to this point. I think we are ready for it – a lot more change.”

Current designs, finalised this spring following a controversial planning application process which began in 2004, also show a new range of rooms, including a eurythmy room for movement studies and a kindergarten block.

The new layout, the first phase of which will be completed next year, will help children aged three to 16 continue learning practical land-based skills alongside more traditional subjects like maths, English, music and science.

“Around the world, Steiner schools work to foster and promote human creativity, innovation and social intelligence,” Mr Mepham explained.

“These qualities are aspects of lifelong learning and stand at the heart of an authentic agenda to create a sustainable and healthy world.”

In line with this ethos, and the academy’s natural environment specialism, work will also leave a minimal carbon footprint. Materials will be locally sourced and the building process itself will be slotted into student timetables.

Malvern builders Speller Metcalfe have pledged to bear this in mind.

Managing director Steve Speller said its local roots and the fact many staff and sub-contractors lived nearby was a good starting point.

“I think in the long term, the nature of construction will change because of sustainable issues and the environment,” he said.

By next September, new classrooms and the school hall should be open, not so operations can expand but simply to allow the theories of educationalist Rudolf Steiner to thrive in a more suitable space.

With capacities already stretched and waiting lists for all classes, there are no plans for growth, only for a better learning environment.

“This academy is in a beautiful village setting and the intention is to add to this beauty in a way that resonates with what is already here,” Mr Mepham added.

Herefordshire’s Steiner school is one of 1,000 worldwide and around 30 in the UK which prepare students for GCSEs in core curriculum subjects as well as striving to develop them as a whole.

•It is the only Steiner Academy in the country. All lessons have artistic, practical and intellectual content and whole class, mixed ability teaching is the norm.

•The Much Dewchurch site began as an independent school in the 1980s when parents and teachers bought the old village school for £22,000 but it is now funded by the Government. As numbers grew, a barn was also converted into classrooms and Church Farm was added in 2000 to provide kindergartens, a nursery and a pottery room.

•As an academy it specialises in land and the natural environment, and subjects like crafts, embroidery, sewing and woodwork are an important part of the curriculum. Pupils learn Spanish and German, and take up a musical instrument before joining the school orchestra in class five. All pupils aim to leave the school with a BTEC in land studies.

•More recently, operations have shrunk in readiness for a new £5 million development to be created using money awarded under the new status.

•Steiner education is based on the work of Dr Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). The first Steiner school opened in Stuttgart in 1919 for children of workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory. The school’s benefactor, managing director Emil Molt, asked Steiner to found and lead the school in its early stages.