It has a cafe for dogs, crystal shops and an organic workers’ cooperative. Next September the eclectic community of Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire will also boast a high school offering daily meditation sessions, morning yoga and vegetarian lunches.

Hebden Bridge school, a private secondary, promises to “foster optimum receptivity to learning through yoga and meditation, democratic decision making, cross-subject learning and community service”.

There will be no headteacher. Instead, decisions will be taken democratically each Wednesday at a meeting where pupils’ voices count as much as staff’s – who are to be addressed by their first names.

“We don’t want to use a traditional structure with a headteacher dictating from top-down how the school should be run,” said its founder, Anil Sarna, who has given himself the title of “lead teacher”.

A qualified shiatsu therapist, yogi and meditation instructor, Sarna has spent the past seven years teaching Spanish and Italian at a school in Rutland but has long dreamed of running a “truly progressive” institution.

While there will be no “petty rules” at the school, lessons will be compulsory, unlike at Summerhill in Suffolk, the UK’s most famous “democratic” school, where founder AS Neill let children choose whether they fancied turning up to class.

Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. The school is scheduled to open in September 2016. Photograph: Alamy

“Yoga and meditation is non-negotiable and so is the idea of cross-subject learning, where pupils are encouraged to make connections between the theoretical and the practical, between one subject and another,” said Sarna.He gives sugar as an example of a topic that can be studied across multiple disciplines, including science (what it contains and its effect on the digestive system), history (the slave trade), music (the music of slaves and its connection to rock and roll, soul, gospel, jazz and R&B).

After a quick registration session, the school day will begin with a 55-minute PE session, including yoga and meditation. “We are not against team sports. They’ve just got to be done in the right way,” said Sarna. Football will be allowed, for example, if “done consciously”.

“If you are playing football and you are doing it because you are developing your physical health and balance at the same time as respecting other people, it’s a conscious, holistic experience for the individual and the group. That isn’t the case if someone has got to win and we’ve got to kick chunks out of our opponents,” he added.

Sarna will initially teach all the humanities, with the only other full-time staff member taking on science and maths. There will also be a part-time art teacher. When full, the school will have up to 100 pupils, and will start with a year-seven cohort in September working out of rooms at the Birchcliffe centre, a converted baptist church run by Pennine Heritage. Fees are likely to be about £2,670 per term.

Hebden Bridge was the natural home for the school, said Sarna. “Something like this requires a community that’s going to support it and feel an empathy with its core values. Hebden has a great receptiveness to what we are trying to do,” he added.

He knows critics will mock the school as a hippy playground, but says it will also offer qualifications. “The key to our school will be getting the best possible results at GCSE. Other alternative schools are very good at ethos and creating a creative environment but not that great at getting kids through exams.



“It’s much more than a hippy school … We are trying to be a truly progressive school, where everyone has the chance to develop not just their academic but also their human potential – the teachers as well as the children.”