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Forest schools are proliferating throughout the U.K., teaching kids to love nature, wildlife, and the outdoors. Early research shows that children who participate develop increased respect for the environment.
For 20 years of her career, Avril Rowley was a primary teacher in schools around inner-city Liverpool. Like many others in the U.K., these schools were equipped with concrete playgrounds, with little green space available for play.
“In the summer we used to take the kids to playing fields for their P.E. lessons,” she recalls. “They’d spend the first 5 or 10 minutes just rolling in the grass because they were so excited to be in nature.”
It was a memory that stuck with Rowley, who went on to become an expert in outdoor education. She’s now a senior lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University and one of many champions of forest schools: a style of teaching and learning that takes children out of the classroom and into the great outdoors.
With a central philosophy that children learn and develop best in natural settings, forest schools have proved popular for their mental health, behavioral, and well-being benefits. Yet experts also believe that for a generation at risk of losing touch with nature, forest schools could be their own form of conservation. By instilling respect for nature in children at an early age, forest schools could show benefits much later down the line — in a generation of adults equipped to protect the environment they love.
Such a switch won’t be easy. Many children in the U.K. today never get the chance to develop a relationship with nature. Recent surveys show that less than half (45%) of children and young people regularly spend time in outdoor spaces other than their garden. Many don’t even have a garden, and access to nature is heavily influenced by affluence: Children at the top 250 English private schools have access to 10 times more outdoor space than those at publicly funded schools.
This alienation from nature has tangible effects, Rowley says.
“On residential trips we took kids on, they didn’t necessarily have respect for nature,” she says. “When they saw spiders or ants, their instinct was to tread on them.”
Since then, Rowley has worked with almost 100 schools in the Liverpool City Region to help introduce the forest school philosophy, which can encompass everything from schools incorporating outdoor learning into the curriculum to free play sessions facilitated by centers external to the school itself.
Born out of the Scandinavian friluftsliv (open-air living) culture in the 1950s, forest schools began with preschool teachers informally taking their students outside to learn and play. As this arrangement grew into a formal philosophy, educators from around the world took note. In 1993, a group of Bridgewater College nursery nurses from the U.K. visited Denmark to observe the preschool system. When they returned, enthused by what they saw, they developed the U.K.’s first forest school at the college nursery.
Since then, the popularity of the concept has boomed. At the end of 2019, the U.K. Forest School Association estimated that around 3,000 to 3,500 settings were in operation across Britain, with a huge spike in demand following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Some schools use their own grounds for forest school, and others use parks or woodland nearby, where external facilitators deliver sessions. Lessons might be similar or the same as those delivered in classrooms or consist of “purer” forms of forest school, teaching children skills like bushcraft or shelter building.
Research shows that the more contact you have with nature, the more likely you are to have pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors.
– Avril Rowley
In either case, researchers examining the impact of forest schools have discovered tangible benefits for children across the board, from improvement in behavioral issues to increased confidence, social skills, and physical dexterity.
Crucially, in the same study, researchers also noted “increased respect for the environment was developed as well as an interest in their natural surroundings. Observational improvements were noted as the children started to identify flora and fauna.”
It’s an effect Rowley has observed in her own work, recalling one student who came to forest school “spending more time washing his hands in the first few weeks than doing anything else.” By the end of the program, she says, “he became a different child, all that fear went, and he didn’t mind getting dirty anymore.”
For several generations, environmental knowledge has been fading as children increasingly live their lives indoors. In a 2017 study, researchers found that 8-year-olds were better at identifying Pokémon characters than real animal species.
Slowly but steadily, a move toward outdoor education could be shifting the dial.
“Research shows that the more contact you have with nature, the more likely you are to have pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors,” Rowley explains.
Though forest school is still a relatively new phenomenon in the U.K., with further study on its impacts required, the early results are promising. The effects of outdoor education appear to ripple beyond forest school itself, with those children who attend more likely to ask their parents to take them outdoors on the weekend, further increasing their time spent in nature.
“Things are changing in this country,” Rowley says, though she’s keen to add that she’d like to see the government do more to formalize outdoor learning.
“It needs to be something that is more obviously promoted, if not even mandated,” she says, pointing out that the government could replicate the U.K.’s “sports premium” scheme at schools for nature: a ring-fenced amount of money for implementing learning in nature.
If the movement continues growing, it’s the hope of many practitioners like Rowley that forest school could help reverse decades-worth of declining knowledge and care for the natural world. As forestry expert Baba Dioum once famously pointed out: “In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”
