How we check every listing
Every school, kindergarten, co-op, camp and shop on the Waldorf Map is read on its own website, and each listing shows the day we last read it.
The place's own website decides
A search engine, an association's list or a family's suggestion can tell us a place exists. None of them puts it on the Map. We read the place's own website, and it goes on only when the site says Waldorf, Steiner or anthroposophy in its own words. A place on its national association's list is listed on that list's word.
We turn away a site that reads as a shop, a course or a curriculum seller, and a site that says the place has closed. Makers and shops are read the same way: the shop's own site has to say it makes or sells Waldorf or Steiner things. A brand name on a product, like a box of crayons sold as a Waldorf set, doesn't count.
The descriptions are ours, written from the place's own pages in plain words, with no claims of being the best or the leading anything.
A date on every listing
Under “How we checked this” on each listing is the day its details were confirmed. For a member school it also shows the day we checked its association's list. A list check more than 400 days old no longer counts, because the lists change every year.
We read every Map place again each year. Co-op listings are read each quarter, and a co-op we can't confirm twice comes off its page. We also run health checks for sites that have stopped loading, moved to a new address or stopped saying Waldorf or Steiner.
A school's tuition shows only when the school prints the school year beside its prices. When the year is missing, we leave the range off.
What the labels mean
“Waldorf school” and “Waldorf kindergarten” (“Steiner school” and “Steiner kindergarten” in Australia and New Zealand) appear only for a place on its national association's own membership list. The place has to be at a level that association counts as membership:
- Association of Waldorf Schools of North America, in the US and Canada: full members and associate members
- Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America, in the US and Canada: full members, for kindergartens and early childhood programmes only
- Waldorf UK, in the UK: full members
- Steiner Education Australia, in Australia: full members
- Steiner Early Childhood Australia, in Australia: full members
- Steiner Education Aotearoa New Zealand, in New Zealand: full members
Every other place that describes its own approach this way is Waldorf-inspired. In the UK, Australia and New Zealand that shows as a tag. In the US and Canada it's a sentence about the place, “Describes its approach as Waldorf-inspired”, and never a tag or a title. The Association of Waldorf Schools of North America holds the Waldorf service mark there, and its guidelines ask that schools outside its membership don't carry the name in directories.
Some lists don't give the label at all, like the Alliance for Public Waldorf Education and LifeWays North America. For those places the page says which list names them. Groups of the Anthroposophical Society carry neither label, because they're study groups, not schools.
The label comes from the list and nothing else. A claim on a page can't change it, and neither can a request to us.
Our crawler
We read the websites of Map places and co-ops with our own crawler, StarpathDirectoryBot. It reads robots.txt first and stays out wherever the file says no. It treats a “checking your browser” page as a no, asks for at most one page a second, and always gives its own name. If a site blocks it, we don't try again under another name. What the crawler reads, and how to block it.
Nobody pays to be listed
Being listed is free, and so is claiming a page. Nobody pays to be listed here or to be placed higher, and we aren't paid for the links to makers' shops.
When something is wrong
Each listing has a “Something wrong here?” link. Tell us what's changed, and we read the place's own website again. The listing changes when the site shows it, or when the place has posted that it has closed. Each dated fix goes in the corrections log.
Know a place or a shop we don't list? Suggest a place or a maker.