Dharma Primary School


Dharma Primary School was the first primary school and nursery in Britain to offer an education based on Buddhist values and celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2015. It is an independent school and nursery based in East Sussex, on the south east coast of England. The 14th Dalai Lama is a patron.
The Dharma Primary School now educates around 80 children in a large historic house in Patcham, Brighton. Fees are £2,348 a term in 2015–16. Children of all abilities and backgrounds are eligible to attend. The school offers a broad curriculum. There are generally 10–20 children in each class with a teacher and an assistant.

History

The idea of founding a Dharma Primary School evolved from the family camps at Buddhist Monastery in Hertfordshire in the mid-1980s. Early in the 90s this interaction between parents, children and members of the Buddhist monastery inspired a group of parents to meet in Brighton with the aim of opening the first Buddhist School for children in the U.K.
Dharma Primary School was founded by a group of parents in 1994, after two years of fund-raising. On 9 September 1994, the school opened its doors to four children in a house in Queen's Park, Brighton. On this day the school received blessings from founder patron, Luang Por Sumedho, a Buddhist monk and teacher, and blessings were also sent from the Dalai Lama, who later became a patron of the school. This was the first full-time school in Great Britain based on the Buddhist faith. By 2000 the co-educational school was teaching children between the ages of three and eleven. By 2005 the number of pupils stood at seventy, with almost equal numbers of boys and girls.
With the support of patrons including Noy Thomson and Peter Carey, Buddhists and founder trustees, the school moved to The White House, Patcham, in June 1995 with eleven children. A nursery and reception class and three mixed-age primary classes were later established.

Head Teachers

The practice of mindfulness is taught in offices, prisons and the military, and in schools. In the UK, the focus of the Mindfulness in Education movement has been on taking mindfulness programmes into secondary schools, where the approach has been shown to help in managing exam stress. Engaging young children with mindfulness requires an experienced approach that takes into account their shorter attention spans and emotional development. Dharma Primary School integrates mindfulness, as a deeper Buddhist ethos, for very young children. The practice may be of benefit to children during their primary school years when the brain’s limbic system is still developing; scientific research has shown that core life skills, emotional literacy and personality traits formed during this crucial period help determine how we will function as adults.
The school integrates short sessions of silent or guided meditation several times a week for young children and connects mindfulness with regular daily activities such as eating, working and playing as a way to develop patience, compassion and self-awareness. In daily meditation the older children are given a range of opportunities to reflect on and discuss experiences that have affected their inner world. On Fridays parents are invited to the school puja, during which there is usually quiet time for meditation, after which the children perform or show some work, or a story is told. As well as mindfulness and meditation, yoga is taught to children, alongside mainstream lessons.