The jobs that wait until the evening
The session is the easy part. What takes the evening is the rest of it: who has paid, who has not returned a consent form, which allergy changed last week, the register to type up, the parent asking what their child did in the woods on Thursday. The Forest School App does those jobs as the term runs, so there is nothing left on the kitchen table at nine o'clock.
Share one link. Parents book a place and pay for it without making an account, and the money goes straight to your own Stripe account rather than sitting with us. You can see who has paid, who is on a payment plan and who has not booked yet, without a spreadsheet and a bank statement side by side. More on bookings and registers.
Parents keep allergies, medical notes, emergency contacts and consents up to date themselves, so what you carry into the wood is this week's answer rather than last September's photocopy. Photo consent is enforced rather than remembered: a child without it cannot be photographed, and the app checks again on the server before anything is saved.
Session reminders, a nudge about an unpaid place, a note that a form is missing: sent for you, on time, in your forest school's name. The jobs that slip are the ones that depend on somebody remembering on a Sunday night.
Whoever booked is already on the register when you arrive. Tap to mark present, note a late arrival or an early collection, and your adult to child ratio is counted as you go and flagged if it slips. Helpers and parent volunteers appear on it too and count towards the ratio, without needing an account or costing anything.
Allergies, medication and the things you most need to know surface right where you are marking people in, which is the moment they matter, rather than in a folder in the car.
The point of it
Observations, photos, incidents, medication given, tools and fire, the weather call you made and why, and your reflection at the end: written while the day is happening, on a phone, with or without signal. One tap turns it into a dated PDF.
So when a school asks for a report, a parent asks about Thursday, or a funder asks what the term achieved, the answer already exists. There is no evening spent turning notes into a document. See forest school record keeping for what each session leaves behind.
Bring your families and your existing bookings in as a CSV. You are not retyping a year of records to get started, and a term can be booked in about ten minutes. If you are coming from a general booking tool, our Bookwhen alternative page covers what changes and what does not.
Everything is UK-hosted under UK GDPR. Children's records stay inside your forest school, they are never sold and never used to train anything, and safeguarding concerns are locked to your Designated Safeguarding Lead alone. The detail is in our privacy policy.
Admin questions
No. Booking is one link and no account. Parents who want to keep consents and medical notes up to date, or see their child's shared observations, can use a parent area, but booking a place never requires it.
To your own Stripe account, directly. You connect the Stripe account you already have, or make one, and payouts are yours on your own schedule. See pricing for the detail.
The field app works without it. Registers, risk assessments, observations and emergency plans are on the phone, and everything syncs when you are back in range. See how the offline app works.
A practitioner account is free, and Solo is £8 a month for a one-person forest school with unlimited woods. There is a page for freelance leaders specifically.
Set up free for 30 days, no card needed. Put one group and one session in, and see how little is left to do afterwards.