What use is a forest school?

It was my privilege last week to spend some time outside with 3 and 4 year old pupils at Notre Dame Forest School. This initiative, guided by Forest School Leader Ms Stephens, and the rest of the Owls Team, allows our BlueBelles Nursery pupils to spend time in the environment learning not only new skills and concepts, but developing their relationship with the world. This chimed with my blog last week about the importance of using guided experiences to allow us to grow as whole people.

The little children I joined were happy, fully engaged, interested, inquisitive and bubbling with enthusiasm. They commandeered me to paint mud onto the trees with them and showed me the bugs they had swept up, gently into cups to examine. I was surprised at their sophistication, gathering tiny fragments from around them to make fairy houses, and their ability to explain what they were doing. I felt a pull from my own happy childhood, where I learned to be creative through a freedom to explore. These children are lucky indeed.

Most children spend a great deal of their educational lives indoors, only being allowed out to ‘play’. This is appropriate if we believe that learning can only take place under certain conditions, if we think that a teacher has to push knowledge into a child in a sterile environment. However, we now understand far more about the growth of children’s brains, and are beginning to understand that intelligence develops through activity, making connections, creative inspiration and rehearsal. Creativity is never nurtured best in confined conditions, and inspiration rarely strikes if prescribed outcomes are valued above great ideas. Connections certainly cannot be made for them, instead of by then, if they are to have real meaning, and it is only possible to rehearse what is already understood. That is not to say that class based learning is outdated, it still plays the major part, and much can be taught and learnt by conventional means, but there is more…..and practical activities such as camping, forest skills, Duke of Edinburgh awards and environmental studies can extend potential by "encouraging and inspiring individuals through positive outdoor experiences" as the Forest Schools do.

In the future school leaders will increasingly accept that creativity is vital to the formation of human beings and to the future of society, and that it is generated not by the training of fixed outcomes but by open ended experiences. None of us can be sure what the future will hold, nor what will happen to the shape of examinations in the next ten years, nor to the world of work or even to society in general, but those children who have developed resilience, interest, inspiration and independence, outside, in the beauty and complexity of creation, will have the advantage over the rest of us.

Now put down this computer and go outside for a walk.