Forest School

What is forest school? 

Forest School is a child-led, play-based ethos that offers children regular opportunities to succeed, improve self-esteem and develop as a person through hands-on learning in a natural setting. It is a long-term program that supports play, exploration and supported risk taking.  

Sessions help to stimulate creativity, build confidence and enable children to learn new skills through activities such as shelter-building, wood-working, natural art and fire-lighting. Children are also given the chance to play and explore their own interests, enabling them to direct their learning and develop a relationship with nature. 

The process helps and facilitates more than knowledge-gathering, it helps learners develop socially, emotionally, spiritually, physically and intellectually. It creates a safe, non-judgemental nurturing environment for learners to try stuff out and take risks. Forest School inspires a deep and meaningful connection to the world and an understanding of how a learner fits within it.  

Our approach to risk means that learners constantly expand on their abilities by solving real-world issues, building self-belief and resilience. We believe that risk is more than just potential for physical harm, but a more holistic thing, there are risks in everything we do, and we grow by overcoming them. Forest School therefore, helps participants to become, healthy, resilient, creative and independent learners.