Primary & middle schools
You did the Level 3. Now you run forest school for eleven classes on top of teaching your own, and every plan, risk assessment and group list lives in a lever-arch file that only you can read. This puts the whole thing in one place: the term's groups, the assessments, the day itself, and a record of what each child actually gained, without you writing it up twice.
Year 3 on Tuesdays for six weeks, Year 5 after half term, the nurture group every Friday. Schedule the whole term in one go, with the right children in the right group, and every session arrives already knowing who's coming and which assessments it needs.
Write the risk-benefit assessment once, in the language the approach actually uses: hazard, benefit, control. Stack it onto every session it applies to. When your head, your EVC or a governor asks to see it, you send a link, not a photocopy of a folder.
The quiet boy who led the fire circle. The one who wouldn't hold a saw in September and ran the tool station by December. Tap it as it happens, and it builds into a picture of confidence, resilience and independence that means something back in the classroom.
Why it's different
If you're off, forest school is off, because the plans, the assessments, the group lists and the knowledge of which child can't go near the pond all live with you. That isn't a filing problem, it's a resilience problem, and it's why so many schools quietly stop. Put it somewhere the rest of the team can stand in: a TA opens the session on her phone and the register, the ratio, the hazards and the plan are already there. Your plans and your assessments stop being yours alone, and forest school survives you having a cold.
Year 3 Beeches · school copse
School groups are big, and the adults change: two TAs this week, a parent helper the next, a student on placement after that. Mark who's actually there and the app works out the ratio live, tightening it the moment you light a fire or open the tool bag, and telling you before you walk into the trees rather than after. Volunteers and parent helpers count as adults on the register without needing a login or a licence. There's more in forest school ratios explained.
The copse behind the field, the country park you walk to, the residential wood in the summer term. Each is its own place with its own hazards and its own emergency plan: where the nearest vehicle access is, what three words to give the ambulance, where the first aid kit lives. Add as many as you use. A cap on woods would just mean an undeclared wood, so there isn't one, on any plan.
Every adult who works with you gets a free account, and their DBS, first aid and forest school qualification live on their own record, not in your folder. Only the school needs a plan: £29 a month flat, VAT included, covering the whole team, every class and every wood. See full pricing.
School questions
Yes. Publish an assessment and it gets a link anyone can open, no login, no PDF in an email. The same goes for your handbook and policies. If you'd rather start from something and edit it, take a free template: site, fire circle, tool use, den building, water and foraging.
That's rather the idea. Anyone on the team opens the session and finds the register, the ratio, the stacked assessments and the emergency plan for that wood already in front of them. What they log in the woods lands in the same record you'd have written yourself.
Medical notes, allergies and consents sit on the child and surface in the session, so whoever's leading sees them without going hunting. Safeguarding concerns are separate and stricter: they're visible only to your designated safeguarding lead, not to staff, and not to us.
No. It's about running proper forest school on the six principles, safely, week after week. The record that satisfies anyone who asks is what falls out of doing that well. We've written about where the two meet in Ofsted and the Forest School Association.
Set your school up free for 30 days, no card needed. Put one term's groups in and see how the Tuesday runs.