For a team, not just a leader
One leader can hold it all in their head. Four leaders, three woods and a term of rotating groups cannot. The Forest School App keeps the whole operation in one place: who is qualified to lead what, which policies they have agreed to, which group is in which wood on Thursday, and the record each of those sessions left behind.
DBS, first aid, forest school level and safeguarding training sit on the person, with their expiry dates. A first aid certificate belongs to the practitioner and follows them to every organisation they work for, so nobody re-enters it twice. You can see at a glance who is covered to lead a session next month and who is about to lapse.
Sites are a safety record, not a price lever, so you get as many as you need on every plan. Each wood keeps its own emergency plan, access notes, nearest road and what three words, and its own risk-benefit assessments, ready on the phone of whoever is standing in it.
Set a term up once and the sessions appear: the Thursday group in Bluebell Wood, every week until half term. Children join a group for a term rather than forever, so September turnover is a new roster and not a morning of unpicking last year's. Planning follows the same shape.
A policy nobody has read is a document, not a practice. Publish your policies and your risk-benefit assessments to the team and the app tracks who has read and agreed to each one, and when. New leader in January, and their outstanding list is waiting for them.
Change something material in a risk assessment and everyone signs again, because what they agreed to last term is no longer what the document says. That is the whole point of the tick, and it is why a busy morning of edits can un-sign the team: the version they agreed to has moved.
The point of it
When a leader is off, a parent asks a question about a session in March, or a school wants to know what their children have been doing, the answer is in one place and it reads the same whoever wrote it. Every session leaves a dated PDF: the register and ratio, the weather decision, the risk assessments that were stacked on it, incidents, medication, tools and fire, and the reflection.
Safeguarding concerns are the exception, and deliberately so. They are locked to your Designated Safeguarding Lead: not general staff, not other admins, and not us.
Parents book and pay through your own booking page, and those bookings become the register the leader carries into the wood. Payments go to your own Stripe account, so the money is yours from the moment it lands. Consents, allergies, medical notes and emergency contacts are kept current by parents themselves, which is the only way they ever stay current.
Bringing an existing forest school across is a CSV of your families and a CSV of your bookings. You do not rebuild a year of records to get started, and you can have a term booked in about ten minutes. There is more on the day-to-day paperwork on our forest school admin software page.
Most management software assumes an office and a signal. Forest school happens in a wood, often with neither. The field app holds your groups, registers, risk assessments and emergency plans on the phone and syncs when you are back in range, so the record is written in the wood rather than reconstructed that evening. See how the offline forest school app works.
Everything is UK-hosted under UK GDPR. Children's records stay inside your organisation, they are never sold and never used to train anything, and one organisation can never see another's data. The detail is in our privacy policy.
Questions from organisations
No. Team is £29 a month flat for the organisation, with unlimited woods and as many leaders as you need. A cap on sites would only push a forest school into not declaring one, which is the opposite of what a safety record is for. Full detail on pricing.
Yes. A practitioner has one account and their own compliance records, and joins each organisation they work for. Their DBS and first aid are entered once and seen by every organisation they are linked to. Each organisation only ever sees its own children.
Yes. Helpers are free: they appear on the register and count towards your ratio without needing a login. You only pay for people who need to sign in and use the app.
It is yours. Sessions export as PDFs and your records can be taken with you. We do not sell data, mine it, or share it between organisations.
Set your organisation up free for 30 days, no card needed. Add your team, your woods and a term, and see a week of it working.