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E T H I C A L L I V I NG E D U C AT I ON Children attending Forest Schools are calmer, more engaged and more confident Forest Schools Annie Davy introduces a grassroots movement that has now come of age Nursery school education in the UK has a strong pedagogical heritage that recognises the fundamental importance of enabling young children to learn from Nature and spend extended time outdoors. Educationalists Margaret McMillan and Susan Isaacs both developed exemplar nursery school gardens with transformative pedagogy in the early part of the 20th century. But in recent decades, childhood for the majority in the Western world has become increasingly urbanised, dominated by consumerism and computer screen-time and by organised, regulated activity in manufactured environments. Perhaps this – plus the increased prescription for and focus on attainment in the school curriculum – has triggered a kind of immune response in the educational system that has fed the phenomenal development of Forest Schools and spawned a proliferation of other projects and movements that strive to rebalance the educational offer to children. Through what the writer Richard Louv has called the New Nature Movement there has been an international plea to stop and think about why more children are overweight and less independent or ‘risk averse’, and why basic ‘facts of life’ such as where food comes from or the names and properties of trees or animals in the neighbourhood do not have higher priority in children’s education. I first came across the concept of Forest Schools in 1999 when visiting a children’s centre at Bridgwater College, in Somerset, where I met a man named Gordon Woodall. A bricklaying instructor by trade, Gordon had had tremendous success working with young people who had been written off by others as ‘impossible’ due to their behaviour. His own passion was hiking and mountaineering, and his secret was to get his construction students out of the classroom and into the woods before trying to ‘teach’ them anything at all. As the young people released their high energy and stress outdoors, they were better able to relax and focus and as a result their behaviour improved significantly. Gordon offered incentives for the young lads he worked with. For example he might say: “Demonstrate to me that you have developed skills and can handle tools safely in the woods, 26 Resurgence & Ecologist November/December 2012
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and I will support you to get access to power tools to build your own speaker boxes back at college.” flowers to the exciting things to explore and discover around them. As word of Gordon’s success with these youngsters spread, a group of nursery nurses who had been inspired by the outdoor experiences they had seen being offered to Scandinavian children during a visit to Denmark asked Gordon if he would help them develop the same kind of thing for the nursery children attending Bridgwater College. Again and again their teachers told me that at Forest School the children listened more, were calmer, asked questions and became physically and emotionally more confident. Quite simply the children and the teachers looked happy, and all of them were learning a lot.More than a place, At first Gordon blanched at the video footage they had brought back showing four-, five- and six-year-olds building and cooking on open fires, climbing trees, and whittling sticks with sharp knives. However, he also saw that the independence, the healthy glow and sparkling eyes, the physical skills and the self-assurance of these youngsters working in woodland settings was in marked contrast to the ‘cotton-woolwrapped’ children he had seen in the playrooms of so many modern nurseries in the UK. So he agreed. “The best-kept classroom and the richest cupboard are roofed only by the sky” – Margaret McMillan Forest School is a process requiring dedicated time for children to learn in Nature through all the seasons. It also requires enthusiastic adults with a deep understanding of both Nature and child development. And if the twin threats of commercial privatisation and an increasingly state-regulated bureaucracy can be kept at bay, the new developments in the Forest School movement can offer an opportunity to really embed this way of learning and transform at a least a part of mainstream education. Bridgwater College became the seeding ground for the modern Forest School movement, which has spread over the last 13 years across the UK, where there are now around 4,000 Forest Schools and 10,000 qualified Forest School leaders, with the numbers growing all the time. A year after my first meeting with Gordon, we had started Forest Schools in primary and nursery schools across Oxfordshire. Every time I went out with the children, I was struck by how, over the course of one session, children as young as three seemed to settle into themselves, becoming more stable in their bodies, their faces opening like crocus Forest Schools are often just putting back what children should have as their birthright. They should not develop some kind of specialist professional mystique. Jenny Doyle, one of the initiators of the Forest School movement, says: “In some Scandinavian settings children learn outside every day all year round until they are seven years old. They don’t do Forest School, they live Forest School.” Annie Davy worked for Oxfordshire County Council Education Department. She is now a director of The Nature Effect. www.thenatureeffect.co.uk www.forestschools.com Issue 275 Resurgence & Ecologist 27

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E T H I C A L L I V I NG E D U C AT I ON

Children attending Forest Schools are calmer, more engaged and more confident

Forest Schools Annie Davy introduces a grassroots movement that has now come of age

Nursery school education in the UK has a strong pedagogical heritage that recognises the fundamental importance of enabling young children to learn from Nature and spend extended time outdoors. Educationalists Margaret McMillan and Susan Isaacs both developed exemplar nursery school gardens with transformative pedagogy in the early part of the 20th century.

But in recent decades, childhood for the majority in the Western world has become increasingly urbanised, dominated by consumerism and computer screen-time and by organised, regulated activity in manufactured environments. Perhaps this – plus the increased prescription for and focus on attainment in the school curriculum – has triggered a kind of immune response in the educational system that has fed the phenomenal development of Forest Schools and spawned a proliferation of other projects and movements that strive to rebalance the educational offer to children.

Through what the writer Richard Louv has called the New Nature Movement there has been an international plea to stop and think about why more children are overweight and less independent or ‘risk averse’, and why basic ‘facts of life’ such as where food comes from or the names and properties of trees or animals in the neighbourhood do not have higher priority in children’s education.

I first came across the concept of Forest Schools in 1999 when visiting a children’s centre at Bridgwater College, in Somerset, where I met a man named Gordon Woodall. A bricklaying instructor by trade, Gordon had had tremendous success working with young people who had been written off by others as ‘impossible’ due to their behaviour. His own passion was hiking and mountaineering, and his secret was to get his construction students out of the classroom and into the woods before trying to ‘teach’ them anything at all.

As the young people released their high energy and stress outdoors, they were better able to relax and focus and as a result their behaviour improved significantly. Gordon offered incentives for the young lads he worked with. For example he might say: “Demonstrate to me that you have developed skills and can handle tools safely in the woods,

26

Resurgence & Ecologist

November/December 2012

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