forest schools in surrey
If you go down in the woods today, you may find a forest school. Samantha Laurie explores a key trend in early years teaching
In a wooded thicket on Ham Common, a group of brightly clad three- and four-year-olds are making hedgehog houses. Or some of them are. One boy, who can scarcely stay still long enough to listen to the preliminary hedgehog chat, is absorbed in making a mud birthday cake. Two little girls are tracking the toad they spotted last week; another is reliving the best of last week’s fun – total body immersion in a mud puddle.
Tree House Learning, now in its fifth year, is part of a growing tribe of forest schools, based on the Scandinavian concept of teaching children outside. Each week, whatever the weather, the happily named Iguana – who disappointingly turns out to be an Ivana in real life – and her fellow teachers run two-hour morning and afternoon sessions in the woods. The only protection against the elements is a tarpaulin across the trees, so wellies and waterproofs are essential.
“Children are not fazed by the weather,” explains April Gutensohn, who set up the school to recreate some of the magic of her own childhood in West Canada for her own children and their peers. “What they love is being able to roam around, explore and pick things up. They learn so much better through movement and doing things.”
But there is more to this than play. The concept of forest learning grew out of a shortage of nursery places in Denmark during the baby boom 1990s. Nurseries solved the problem by taking half of the group outdoors for the day. Soon they observed that the children spending more time outdside were showing greater physical and social confidence than their peers.
Here, the first forest nursery in the UK to offer full outdoor day care (8am – 6pm) opens in Wimbledon next month. Little Forest Folk is the brainchild of Leanna and James Barrett, driven by the couple’s search for active outdoor nursery care for their own two children, aged three and 18 months.
“We both had outdoor childhoods,” explains James. “I grew up in Australia, Leanna in Wales, and we wanted the same connection with nature and free rein for imaginative play for our children.”
The day will begin and end in a scout hut – hot breakfasts and dinners – but the bulk of it will be spent on the four-hectare site beside Wimbledon Common. The aim is to have kids running around outdoors for most of the day – only in the event of strong winds will they remain in the scout hut.
Base camp will include an eight-metre geodesic dome that will serve as a shelter. Instead of the plastic toys and sterilised equipment found in a regular suburban nursery, the children will enjoy minibeast hunts, mud painting, nature trails and mud ‘kitchens’. Scandinavian waterproofs will be provided, washed and dried each evening.
“If it works in Norway and Denmark, where temperatures get seriously low, it can work here. If their hands are warm, the rest is easy,” insists James.
Unlike Tree House Learning, a not-for-profit community venture that charges £11 per two-hour session, Little Forest Folk is priced comparably with traditional daycare: £69 for a full day; £40 for half day; £30 a session (all 2-5 year olds). But with an adult to child ratio of 1:4 – far better than the legal requirement – the mix of close attention and fresh air should have strong parental appeal.
It’s an exciting development of an established idea: outdoor nurseries already run successfully in Scotland and North London (though not for full day care). Their roots lie in Edwardian pedagogical thinking. A century ago, social activist sisters Margaret and Rachel McMillan opened the first open-air nursery in Deptford, a response to the health problems of poor urban communities.
Surprisingly, the forest school concept – regular child-led outdoor learning in a natural environment – is most popular in cooler climates. In Britain it has flourished as an antidote to a highly formalised early years system, while many schools are now seeing the benefit of weekly outdoor learning on student behaviour and confidence.
At Wildwoods Forest School, in Cobham, Jacqui Allbert runs sessions for pre-schoolers and local schools and, from last month, stay and play sessions for babies and their parents.
“The new generation of parents, who never had a free-roaming childhood, can be fearful; nervous about letting their children get too dirty,” she says. “Yet the beauty of woodland is that – unlike plastic toys – sticks, leaves, seeds, fruit and mud puddles are an endless resource. That has such a difference on creativity and confidence.”
