‘We were so busy playing we forgot to turn up for French’

As a nine-year-old at my local state primary in Devon, I heard some weird stories about life at the Steiner school two miles away.

There were playground rumours of children there refusing to turn up to class, calling teachers by their first names, and then throwing chairs at them.

It was 1987, shortly before Thatcher's government introduced the National Curriculum, and my parents decided that state education was becoming too "stifling". So I was sent to the hippy school down the road.

But instead of a festival of free love among sandal-wearing nudists, I found myself in a school that encouraged children to think for themselves. We were invited to take care over everything we did and, even in science, to illustrate all our work as beautifully as possible.

We learned about Norse myths and Indian gods; two monks dropped in to teach us how to meditate.

We walked the length of the River Dart, almost fell to our deaths down a cliff, camped in a field near a haunted barn, and forgot to turn up to French one afternoon because we were playing in the woods for three hours.

There were some pretty odd characters among the staff — and plenty of beards and sandals on show. In my time there doing external exams was almost unheard of and watching television at home was supposed to be banned.

But my two wacky years at a Steiner school gave me exactly the kind of experience that all children deserve.

When I left to begin secondary education at the local comprehensive, I missed my classmates and what politicians would call the "distinctive ethos" of the place.

There was one thing I was pleased to escape, though — the maths they taught to 10-year-olds was impossible.