Help & guides

Getting started

Set up your wood and its emergency plan Where you meet, how an ambulance finds you, and the daily check you walk before the children arrive Add your team Leaders, assistants and volunteers, what each role can do, and the difference between a helper and someone who signs in Add the children One at a time, or all at once from the spreadsheet you already have, with medical notes and photo consent Plan a term and open it for booking A group is the cohort, a term is its dated run of sessions, and opening the term puts it on your booking page A school or set groups, with nothing to book Schools, nurseries and contract groups don't take bookings. Say so when you set up and the prices, booking page and payment states never appear Run your first session on your phone One page that follows the day in order: the checks before the children arrive, the register, what happens, and the look back The field app Sign in once with signal, then run sessions in the wood with none; everything saves on the phone and sends when it can

Diary

The agreements your group wrote for themselves Type the children's rules in their words, add a photo of the sheet they made, and read it in the wood Training and CPD days for practitioners Sell places on a training day from your booking page, run it with a delegate list, and close it with the day in each delegate's CPD log Training days for your own team Put your team's training in the diary, mark who came, and give each of them a confirmed entry in their CPD log

Bookings

Terms and conditions people agree to when they book Upload your terms, link them, or write them in, and nobody can book without agreeing and signing Prices, sibling rates and other tickets One standard price, plus named prices for siblings, families and under-4s, each with its own rule about who can pick it Approve new families before they book People you do not know ask before they can book, and you approve or decline Cancel a date, and refunds Cancelling a session keeps it on the record and cancels its places; money comes back from Orders, one session at a time if you like Connect your payout account People pay by card, the money lands in your own bank through Stripe, and a priced term can't open until this is done Pay it forward A page where anyone can fund a place for a child at an amount you name; you're emailed when a gift arrives and choose who it helps

Children

Adding a child to one date, or to the whole group A place can be for a single session or every date, and either can be undone from the same sheet Give families access Your join code, the requests it brings in, and what a connected person can see and do Consents and photos What the person booking agrees to, where it's recorded, and what happens to a photo of a child without photo consent

Records

Observations and the child's record What you noticed, in the moment, tagged with the areas of development, gathered on each child's record and shared with families when you choose

Library

Risk assessments A library of risk-benefit assessments, stacked onto each term, read and signed by every leader on their phone

Settings

Plan templates Write a session plan once, name it, and drop it onto any session from the plan editor

Not using the app yet? Start free, or ask us anything at hello@forestschool.app.

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