Woodland site
The standing assessment for the wood itself. Write it once, review it annually, walk it every session.
Free templates
Risk-benefit assessment templates, free to take.
Six risk-benefit assessments in the format Forest School leaders are actually taught: the benefits weighed first, then hazards, associated risks, a severity and likelihood score, your controls, and the risk that remains. Take them, change them, make them yours.
A template is not an assessment
Your wood is not our wood. The trees are different, the ground is different, the water is different, and the children are different. Nobody can write your risk assessment from a website, and any site that tells you otherwise is selling you something.
What these give you is the structure and the prompts: the hazards that catch people out, the controls that are worth arguing for, and the benefits that are worth keeping. The judgement is yours. So is the signature, and so is the responsibility that goes with it. Walk your own site, write down what you find, and review it.
Each template ends with a list of the things it cannot possibly know about your site. Start there.
The six
Start with the one you need today.
Tool use: knives, saws and peelers
The safe answer, the first time, is always 'not yet'. And 'not yet' has a way of lasting all term while the tools stay in the bag.
Fire circle
Fire is not an optional extra you tolerate. It is one of the reasons the children come. Assess it so that you can keep it.
Den building
Heavy things, lifted by children, in teams. Almost everything about it is good for them, and none of it assesses itself.
Water and ponds
The most consistently loved part of the session, and the one most often cancelled by a form.
Foraging and tasting
Wild garlic, blackberries, elderflower. One rule sits above all the others and is never, ever bent.
Why ours weigh the benefit
A risk assessment lists what could go wrong. A risk-benefit assessment asks what the child gets.
Most templates you will find online have a hazard column, a control column, and nothing else. Fill one in honestly and you end up with a document that argues, page after page, for doing less: no fire, no knives, no stream. Which is how a forest school quietly turns into a walk in a wood with rules.
Supported risk is the fifth of the FSA's six principles. The benefit column is what lets you say yes: to the fire, to the bow saw, to the stream that is higher than it was last week. Weigh both sides, write down the call you made and why, and you can keep the things the children actually came for. Our guide to writing a risk-benefit assessment walks through it properly.
Write them once. Stack them on every session.
Keep your assessments as a reusable library, stack the right ones onto each session, and log the dynamic call you make on the day, offline, in the woods. Free for practitioners, never per child.