IMAGINE a school free of exam pressures, where children can design their own courses, and where school dinners are freshly picked each day from an organic garden.

As thousands of mainstream pupils deal with the annual ritual of A-level and GCSE results, one Hampshire boarding school is ploughing a very different educational furrow.

Brockwood Park School, between Bramdean and West Meon in the upper Meon Valley, is holding its thirtieth anniversary reunion today, welcoming back more than 250 former pupils whose lives were shaped by a pioneering ideology.

The school remains the only one in Britain founded by the world-famous philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, an early advocate of holistic education.

He wanted pupils to discover their own potential in an atmosphere without narrow rules - instead of "fitting in", he asked them to ques-tion society's accepted norms.

Unlike religious schools, Brockwood has no overarching dogma - except the simple message that all beliefs should be challenged. Administration director Bill Taylor argues the school is even more relevant now with many children motivated to sit exams more through a fear of failure than genuine interest in their subject matter.

He said: "There's much more to education than academics, but these days we seem to have an increasing obsession with measuring the productivity of pupils through league tables. "How do you measure a young person's capacity for co-operation, integrity and honesty It's not easy to base a school on that but this is what Krishnamurti did.

"We feel the things that cannot be measured are just as important as the things that can be. Pupils here don't have to do exams, some choose not to."

The school occupies a 36-acre former country estate just outside the village of Bramdean. It boasts a high degree of concentration on arts, languages, humanities, and practical environmental work.

There are currently 60 pupils aged from 13 to 20, enjoying a 5:1 pupil to staff ratio and a totally vegetarian diet.

The Brockwood "weekend" falls on a Tuesday and Wednesday, enabling visitors to see work in progress on a Saturday and Sunday.

The midweek break also allows pupils and staff to enjoy trips in relative peace and quiet.

The price of this scholarly nirvana is not cheap - fees are £8,900 a year - and in fact most pupils do go on to further education having opted for the exam route. As it's an international school, they can choose from a range of qualifications.

Speaking at a reunion reception, Mr Taylor described the school as "something of a nest" with the real test of its success whether the birds can fly when they leave.

He added: "We are constantly asked what happens to people when they leave. It's the wrong question - everything happens to people when they leave."

Mid-70s pupil Kris Jones, now a geography teacher living in California, summed up the difficulties of leaving such a Shangri-La.

He said: "When I was here I travelled through Europe and India. The interaction I had with the other students gave me a much broader perspective, but it did take me a while to adjust when I got home. It took me eight or nine years to really get a professional thing going because the experience made me want to do a lot of other things first.

"It's a special place, nice and friendly. The problem is, the world isn't."

Converted for the new archive on 25 January 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.