It may not be surprising that the Maharishi School, with its unique approach, started with very small class sizes. However, since applying to be a Free School the school has more than doubled its pupil roll and has increased its intake number several times. The current class size is 20 pupils, and many year groups have waiting lists. 
Originally all on one site, since the Free School status was awarded, the two phases of the school, primary and secondary, have been based on separate sites, neither of which are big enough for the school to address all of the activities schools are now responsible for.
The Maharishi School’s admissions policy does not restrict its intake to just the immediate local area. Children come to the school from various local authorities as well as Lancashire County Council’s catchment, including Merseyside, Sefton and Wigan, and sometimes even further afield. It has a wide mix of pupils in terms of socio-economic backgrounds. Skelmersdale has a high deprivation score, whereas other parts of nearby West Lancashire are at the opposite end of the scale.

Since becoming a Free School, Ofsted have inspected the school twice, in 2017 and 2023. On both occasions the school was rated as Good, with Outstanding in 2017 for Personal  development, Behaviour and Welfare, which aligns with the impact of CbE, and particularly TM during the school day. 

The Maharishi School obtaining state funding was highly influential in the successful funding application to introduce Quiet Time with TM in a number of European schools with high immigrant populations and significant levels of deprivation. The resulting societal stress was a concern and the project was initially intended to help combat radicalisation. Funded by the EU Erasmus scheme, the first project (EUROPE) was so successful, that a second (FRIENDS) was also approved, and included schools in the UK.

The Maharishi School played an active role in both projects, which took place from 2016 to 2019 and started while the UK was still an EU member, with former Maharishi School Head, Dr Derek Cassells acting as an advisor. Research in 2016 estimated that between about 3,900 and 4,300 then EU member state nationals had become Isis fighters, most of them from the UK, France, Germany and Belgium, according to a published European Parliament report. Of these, an estimated 30 per cent had already returned home. The question was: why had they preferred to leave the school system and go to fight, instead of staying home and studying? On the surface, there could be many potential answers to this question, including general wellbeing, social exclusion and mental health/happiness. Research on TM, with its ability to remove stress from the physiology, and correspondingly the mind, showed that it offered significant improvements in these areas. This, together with the performance and reputation of the Maharishi School being  recognised by the DfE, pointed to a more profound answer. The removal of individual stress, resulting in reduced societal stress, was considered to be worth a try, and the project received its funding. Staff and students in several schools around the EU participated.

EUROPE was so successful, that a second project, FRIENDS, was also funded, again with Maharishi School input, with additional schools joining the experiment. A number of studies on the project, utilising recognised academic methodologies, took place and their results published in the final project evaluation report. 

Even after just 3 months there are noticeable differences between the Quiet Time/TM group and the control group, and clear improvements within the meditating pupils themselves. Many of the schools in the two projects have continued to offer the Quiet Time/TM programme independently. Below are some of the results, from the final report, available in full on the project website -friends-project.eu/

 

This chart shows how the pupils
selected for the Quiet Time /TM group had high levels of emotional difficulties at the start of the project, which reduced
significantly in just 3 months. The control group’s emotional problems at the start were much lower than the TM
group, but over the 3 months increased to almost the same high level the TM group started with.

 

 

 

This chart shows the
comparison between the TM
group’s reduction in conduct
problems after 3 months, and
the increase in conduct issues with the control group over the same period.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This chart shows
reductions in several
aspects of negative
mental health 
categories, indicative of high stress levels, and one aspect of positive mental health – resilience – which
started improving over the 3 months.