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.HistoryThe idea of founding a Dharma Primary School evolved from the family camps at Amaravati 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.