Exclusive interview: Montessori St Nicholas on its milestone year

Sitting in her airy office with prints on the wall of illustrations from her favourite children’s books, Leonor Stjepic, Montessori St Nicholas Group’s new CEO, tells me that ‘the workers of the future’ have much to learn from Maria Montessori.

Marlborough House in St John’s Wood (right), where the MSN charity and the Montessori Centre International (MCI) training centre have been based since last year, was once the home of another innovator, Sir Thomas Huxley, an English biologist.

‘If you’re looking at what’s happening now in terms of the fourth industrial revolution, the future worker has to have the sort of skills that we value in Montessori, the ability to be creative, collaborative, problem solve,’ Ms Stjepic says.

Ms Stjepic, who has been in the post since last June, has big plans to celebrate the 100th anniversary of when pioneering educator Maria Montessori first started training students in the UK.

A major part of this year’s celebration is a specially commissioned garden for the Chelsea Flower Show (see below).

Barbara Isaacs, Montessori global ambassador, explains, ‘In the first children’s house in Rome, children had an outdoor classroom. It was the time of the McMillan sisters and
Susan Isaacs, so there was a general interest and trend in outdoor learning.’

Maria Montessori, of course, famously started her educational philosophy in the slums of Rome, and the idea behind the Chelsea garden is also to show what today’s urban children, who often don’t have the luxury of a garden, can do with their families.

Ms Stjepic adds, ‘You can grow things on your window sill. It’s very much going back to the roots of Montessori and social impact work. Montessori is not just for those who are privileged enough to have a house and a garden. It’s actually something that can be done anywhere and quite easily without necessarily having those things.’

Chef Chantelle Nicholson from Tredwells has come up with very child-friendly recipes based on the principles of the garden that children can share with their parents. ‘So it’s following that whole food chain of growing something, cooking it, eating it.’

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