The Mount Camphill Community

The Mount Camphill Community is an Independent Specialist College offering day and residential places for students aged 16-25 years with Special Educational Needs.

Our curriculum offers an alternative to mainstream colleges with its roots in anthroposophical principles. These support the development and learning of the whole human being reinforced with a therapeutic impulse running throughout.

We offer an inclusive, person-centred curriculum which balances and supports cognitive learning and skills development. Our curriculum includes crafts such as felting, baking, weaving, clay / pottery, candle making, basketry as well as subjects like gardening, cooking, work skills and life skills. The crafts are used as a medium to develop wider skills, for example forming a group, interacting with peers and developing perseverance.

All students also attend daily movement sessions in either Bothmer Gymnastics or Eurythmy. Our curriculum is designed to support sensory and physical development. This is incorporated through activities that promote fine and gross motor skill development, awareness of sequencing eye and hand coordination, building stamina as well as developing improved proprioceptive awareness through resisted activities all developed within a safe learning environment.

Students attend either as residential or as day students. Our residential students stay either 5 or 7 nights a week (38 weeks per year). All are engaged in learning and are part of a household within The Mount. Formal and informal education merge across the waking day curriculum with students able to transfer skills from craft sessions to work placements and within the home.

At The Mount, residential students develop their independence skills through the waking day curriculum by learning self-care, participating in food preparation for breakfast and supper, household tasks throughout the week, weekend trips involving travel and leisure activities such as reading, games, fitness and social activities.

All students attend Work Skills sessions to build specific skills and to provide a workskills journey that builds each year on prior knowledge. This equips students with the confidence, skills, experience that they will need for their future lives.

Whilst at The Mount, all students take part in work experience where each new placement develops different learning opportunities. All students engage in internal work experience choosing placements such as cooking, maintenance, laundry, office, gardening, preparation / delivery of our community tea-break or serving at our periodic in-house café "Cafe Mount".  

Students also have the opportunity to engage in external work experience. These placements vary in time and length and are individualised to each student. Our placements include café, bookshop, garden centre, horse stables, woodland management, garden maintenance, children's nursery, residential care home and animal rescue.

The holistic living, learning, working approach at The Mount offers everyone opportunities to engage in meaningful occupations throughout the day. The waking day curriculum is structured to provide a sensory lifestyle to support students with identified underlying sensory processing, integration and modulation challenges.  

The Mount offers a range of specialised anthroposophical therapies which nurture the whole person, including Speech and Language Therapy, Occupational Therapy, Painting Therapy, Bothmer Gymnastics, Eurythmy Therapy, Massage and Arts Counselling.