Record keeping
The shoebox of paper. The laminated forms that never quite match the day. The accident book in the boot, the consent slips in a folder at home. The Forest School app gathers all of it into one source of truth (registers, risk-benefit assessments, accidents, consents and learning journeys) so the day is already written down before you walk out of the wood — and your evening is your own.
The children who booked the session arrive already on the register: tap to mark present, note an early collection, log who's late. Attendance and your adult-to-child ratio are recorded as you go, not reconstructed from memory afterwards.
Keep a library of reusable risk-benefit assessments (tool use, fire, water, the woodland itself) and stack the ones you need onto each session. They're snapshotted to that day, so the record shows exactly the risks you assessed, with your dynamic on-site notes alongside.
No more accident book in the boot. Record a bump, a near-miss or an incident there and then, with the time, what happened and what you did. It lives on the session record, so nothing slips through — and the near-misses you log are how the site gets safer next term.
The information you most need in the woods is the information hardest to lay your hands on when it's stuffed in a folder at home. In the Forest School app, parents keep allergies, medical notes, emergency contacts and consents up to date through their own portal, so what you carry into the session is current, not last term's photocopy.
Consent is built into the day rather than bolted on. A child without photo consent simply can't be photographed: the app won't let it happen, and it re-checks server-side so the rule holds however you're using it. Allergies and medication needs surface right where you're marking the register, so the adult on the ground sees them at the moment they matter. It's the difference between a consent slip you hope is still valid and a live record you can trust.
The point of it
Every session exports as one clean PDF that gathers the lot: the register and who attended, your adult-to-child ratio, the weather decision you made and why, the risk-benefit assessments you stacked, any incidents or accidents, medication given, tools and fire use, and your end-of-day reflection.
It's the same record you kept as you ran the day, not a tidy-up written afterwards to look good — and that's the whole trick. Good practice, recorded honestly while it happens, means there is nothing left to assemble: not for a parent who asks, not for a funder, not for an FSA assessor or an inspector, and not for you at nine o'clock at night. One tap, one PDF. You wrote it by doing the day properly.
Session record · 12 June
Good forest school isn't a one-off worksheet. It's a cycle, and the app follows it. You plan a session and its risk-benefit assessments; you observe what children actually do, capturing observations and photos against each child as the day unfolds; you adapt on the ground, logging dynamic risk decisions and changes of plan as the weather or the group shifts; and afterwards you review with a reflection that feeds straight into planning the next one.
Because each step is captured where it happens, the learning journey builds itself. Over a term you can see a child's progress as a thread of observations, not a blank book you dread filling in on a Sunday night, and it maps cleanly onto the EYFS areas of learning when you need it to.
You're holding children's data, so it has to be handled properly, and it is. The Forest School app is built to UK GDPR from the ground up. Children's records stay inside your forest school: they aren't shared across other providers, they're never sold, and they're never mined to train anything. Your records are yours.
Safeguarding is treated with the seriousness it deserves. Concerns are locked to your Designated Safeguarding Lead: not visible to general staff, not to other admins, and never to us as the people who run the platform. Everything is UK-hosted and kept strictly separate, so one organisation can't see another's data. You can read exactly how we handle it in our privacy policy.
Record-keeping questions
One dated document per session: the register, ratios, the weather decision, the risk-benefit assessments you stacked, incidents, medication, tools and fire, and your reflection. It's contemporaneous — you built it while running the day, not from memory afterwards — which is what makes it worth anything, to you or to anyone who asks. See our Ofsted guide if you want the inspection angle.
Only your Designated Safeguarding Lead. Safeguarding concerns are deliberately kept apart from ordinary records: general staff and other admins can't see them, and neither can we as the platform operator. That separation is enforced in the software, not just in policy.
It's UK-hosted under UK GDPR, kept inside your forest school, and it stays yours. We don't sell it, we don't mine it, and we don't share it with anyone else. Full detail is in our privacy policy.
Set your forest school up free for 30 days, no card needed. Run a session, tap once, and you've a PDF ready for anyone who asks.