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Yarra Valley Grammar's inclusive, welcoming community is one of our families genuinely love and a place where our students feel inspired to achieve their very best. Set on a single 29-hectare campus, the school offers a coeducational learning experience for students from Early Learning through Year 12. Our students are supported by talented and dedicated teachers who love what they do and know how to bring out the best in each individual. They understand the value of boys and girls working together to develop teamwork and self-confidence. With around 1,300 students, our school is large enough to offer a diverse program but small enough that their teachers and peers know each student. Since 1966, Yarra Valley Grammar has offered students the best possible learning opportunities and experiences under exceptional teachers' guidance. Our approach is based upon Christian values of compassion, inclusion, acceptance, and commitment. How these values are brought to life and sustained through actions and recognition forms the basis of our school's culture. We have high expectations for our students. We are committed to meeting our responsibilities to each of these young people: to equip them with the skills, knowledge, and values they will need to become young men and women of integrity, with the confidence to strive to achieve their best. Our students are taught, nurtured, and inspired by an outstanding team dedicated, passionate, and committed to their roles as teachers, role models, and mentors. We believe that when teachers and students develop strong relationships built on mutual trust and respect, our students will be happy and willing learners. This generation will be the most educated in history. But no longer can we measure education in what we know. Information is too vast in the 21st century to be able to do that. Instead, to be truly well educated, students need to know where to find knowledge, process it, and use it. From Early Learning to Year 12, we build the skills for independent lifelong learning. Constant monitoring and reviewing of the teaching and learning program ensure that we provide a comprehensive and stimulating curriculum relevant to the needs of young people in modern society. In the early years, we focus on self-discovery. Our innovative enhancement program breaks out of the classroom in the middle years and gives students practical and engaging experiences. In the senior years, we focus on academic rigor, always preparing our students ahead of time for the challenges that they will face. Students from a broad range of backgrounds, and partnerships with overseas schools, create a culture of diversity at Yarra Valley Grammar. We encourage our students to look outside their immediate networks and consider their place as global citizens – a concept defined by mindset rather than nationality. We encourage them to pause now and then in their day to day lives and consider our rapidly changing world. This enables them to understand their place in society and look for opportunities to contribute in a meaningful way. As a leading practitioner in co-education, Yarra Valley Grammar creates appropriate opportunities for boys and girls to work together. The School Board has developed a Yarra Valley Grammar Strategic Plan 2015-2020 to guide the school's future. Within that plan is an ongoing commitment to ensure that Yarra Valley Grammar remains a leader in education in Melbourne's east. Adopting that commitment, Principal Dr. Merry and his team have developed the Teaching and Learning Strategic Plan. The Teaching and Learning Strategic Plan supports our commitment to excellence in education and recognizes that our most incredible resource is excellence in teaching and exceptional teachers. The school actively undertakes to recruit highly professional people and to develop and support excellence in teaching. The Board fully supports teaching and learning by providing the appropriate resources, facilities, and personnel, as outlined in the Yarra Valley Grammar Strategic Plan. By supporting this Teaching and Learning Strategic Plan, we aim to ensure that the Yarra Valley Grammar experience is a defining one in young people's lives, emphasizing the educational experience's quality. This will include the school's culture, how our values are brought to life, sustained positively, and felt by all connected with the school. We will ensure consistency of teachers' performance, action, and delivery. We will generate confidence in all our stakeholders in the school's values, contribution, philosophy, strategies, and impact at an individual, family, community, and societal level. At Yarra Valley Grammar, 'confidence to achieve' is our mantra and our students' reality. We aim to instill a love of learning that starts with our students' very earliest years at school. In the ELC and Junior School, students' introduction to learning focuses on self-discovery and success. In Middle School, we concentrate on transition and enhancing the curriculum with unique and stimulating opportunities to engage and motivate teenagers. In the senior years, academic rigor becomes very important as we prepare our students for life after school. We are proud of our reputation as an inclusive, caring place to learn and grow and of our ability to bring out the best in our students through a comprehensive program delivered by exceptional teachers. Explore our school and find out what makes us unique. 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Little Yarra Steiner School is co-educational and based on Christian spiritual principles as given by the Austrian philosopher and educationalist Dr. Rudolf Steiner. By these principles teachers strive in freedom to create the physical and educational environment that can best help the incarnating child to develop such qualities of will, feeling, and thought as will lead them to fulfill their earthly destiny with dignity and confidence. The location for Little Yarra Steiner School began with a gift: in 1986, while the school’s first Kindergarten and Prep group were getting underway in temporary premises in Wesburn, local farmer, Alan Earle, agreed to have the school built on his property along the Little Yarra River. When Alan’s land proved too flood-prone for major building development, he gave his land to be sold so that a more suitable property could be bought for the school. Alan’s gift enabled the purchase of the current property and the school in 1989 was able to move from a small Public Hall to its new home, a beautiful 60-acre block, also along the Little Yarra River, two kilometers south of the center of Yarra Junction. The beauty, central location, and generous size of the property, which was more than what was needed for the school, gave rise to an initial broader long term vision which included a bio-dynamic farm and other cultural initiatives such as a performing arts center, recording studio, artisans workshops, adult education facilities and similar ventures complementary to the school and forming part of a larger spiritually and culturally inspired center arising over time within a supportive community. Since moving to Little Yarra Road with a handful of children in 1989, the school has grown to over 300 students, ranging from Kindergarten through to class 12. With the inception of the first class 12 in 2004, the school has been able to offer an exciting program that embraces Steiner’s indications within the framework of the VCE, as well as an optional Class 12 project successfully pioneered within the Steiner School movement overseas and in Australia. With the consolidation of the primary and completion of the secondary school, the magnitude of Alan Earle’s generous gift can now be seen and appreciated as it continues to bear fruit. View full school