After the Steiner schools crisis of 2019/20 – when many Steiner Waldorf schools closed due to appalling lapses in child safety – how many schools survived the turmoil, how many are there today?

There used to be 31 Steiner schools before the crisis. In its aftermath 7 schools would close by the end of 2022 and a further 6 have closed since then. Only 18 recognised Steiner Waldorf schools remain and new schools aren’t opening.

However, if you visit their very busy-looking map of schools the Waldorf UK website lists 34 entries. By choosing to mix into its list kindergartens and Early Years settings, affiliates and childminders (yes, childminders), Waldorf UK manages to convey, accidentally or by design, an illusion of a bustling UK Steiner education scene.

So, there are 18 recognised Steiner Waldorf schools across the UK. Drilling down into data pulled from various sources (e.g. DfE, Ofsted, accounts, the schools themselves) confirms there are only 18 schools. We can use the data to arrive at an estimate of the total school population of Steiner schools.

Some figures for you. In 2024/25 there were about 10.5 million pupils on roll in UK schools. Around 94% of these attend state-funded schools and 6% (approximately 630,000 pupils) attend independent schools. For England about 111,700 children were home-schooled; there are no comparable figures for other UK areas.

For Steiner Waldorf schools my own tally finds 3,411 children on roll across the UK. Let’s be generous and round that up to a total of 4,000 on roll – that’s a 17% increase, enough to allow for fluidity in school populations, out-of-date data etc. They are, of course, fee-paying private schools and there are about 630,000 such pupils across the UK.

So, 4,000 children attend Steiner Waldorf schools, which is about 0.63% of the private school sector and about 0.038% of all the children on roll in the UK.

By comparison with another belief-driven alt-ed movement, a conservative estimate of the numbers of children attending Montessori schools would be approximately 15,000 children (based on 2019 info). That’s roughly 2–3% of the private/independent schools sector. Steiner Waldorf schools, by contrast, remain a small and declining presence within the independent sector, their institutional footprint far smaller than their historical reputation might suggest.