The First Children to Leave
In December 2020, two students walked out of Farmhouse Montessori School for the last time and went off to high school. They were the first children in the school’s history to complete Year 6 here.
The school was founded in 1982. It had taken thirty-eight years to reach that moment.
A preschool that grew upwards
Farmhouse started as a preschool. In December 1981 a group of parents who had tried and failed to find a Montessori place for their children formed the Manly Warringah Montessori Society, and five and a half months later the school opened with sixteen students in a community centre at Manly Vale.
For three decades that is what it was: a well-regarded Montessori preschool. Families who wanted the education to continue had to look elsewhere at age six.
The primary school opened in 2014, in the Gatehouse at North Head, with four students. Those four became thirty-five within three years. And the children who had started in the early cohorts kept going — through the six-to-nine classroom, then the nine-to-twelve — until in 2020 the school finally had a Year 6 to graduate.
Two children. It is a small number, and it is the whole point. A school does not become a primary school when it opens the building. It becomes one when the first child finishes.
What the year actually looked like
2020 was not a gentle year to reach a milestone in. The graduation ceremony was held with Stage 3 parents only, under COVID restrictions. The end-of-year concert was delivered over Zoom.
The school marked it anyway, and the newsletter from that summer is unfussy about it:
This year saw our school reach an amazing milestone. Our first graduates will complete their Stage 3 enrolment and take the giant steps off to high school. We are very proud to see these wonderful human beings embark on the next steps of their educational journey.
The other thing that happened that term
In the same weeks, the kindergarten children from the North Balgowlah preschool campus made their first visits to the primary campus at North Head, in preparation for starting there the following year.
The teacher’s account of it is the passage worth keeping:
As the transitioning children arrived for the first time, they were met with the familiar faces, comforting smiles, and words of confidence from peers who graduated a year before. They were shown around their new environment, shown where to hang their hat and what time snack occurs.
Older children showing younger children where to hang their hat. That is the mixed-age classroom doing exactly what it is designed to do, at the scale of a whole school.
The same account notes what happened next: “Almost immediately clubs were formed, projects were put into action and future plans were laid out for us all to see.”
The question underneath
Every family considering a Montessori primary asks some version of the same question. If we do this, will our child be able to cope with what comes afterwards?
It is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer rather than a reassurance. Here is ours.
Our transition policy inside the school is based on readiness, not on the calendar — children move into the next three-year classroom when they demonstrate the physical, social and cognitive behaviours of the next stage, whenever in the year that happens. Transitions are planned in consultation with the child, the teachers and the parents, and considerable effort goes into familiarising a child with the environment before they enter it.
The same thinking applies to leaving. The graduating cohort is prepared for high school by a curriculum that has spent six years asking them to manage their own time, organise their own projects, work in groups, resolve their own disputes and be accountable for outcomes that other people depend on.
There were two of them in 2020. There have been more every year since.