A quietly uplifting article about Forest Schools appeared in the pages of this week’s Wednesday’s Times. If you can’t read it online, then do at least look at this website about the phenomenon of Forest Schools – this model of outdoor schools, relatively common in Scandinavia, is being adopted by a number of schools in this country, and is definitely a ‘good news’ story.
Whilst a part of us may feel a little nervous about the prospects of allowing our children to explore the outside environment unhindered by too many rules or constraints, the upsides of freedom and the development of self-regulation undoubtedly outweigh the downsides. And how exciting for the children – to be able to roam around and just explore and have fun! I am certain that enough rules must be in place to make it safe enough – otherwise I doubt that Sandfield Natural Play Centre would have been awarded an ‘outstanding’ rating by Ofsted – but the real attraction is that this is in fact a riskier environment than our children have grown used to.
The real risk, of course, in a world which we endeavour to make as ‘risk-free’ as possible for our children, is that they do not learn how to deal with risk at all. And if this world in which we live is anything, it is risky, and we need to prepare our young people for this, so that they learn how to deal with this risk safely. Catherine Prisk, head of Play England, was quoted in The Times as saying: ‘If a child is given only a safe environment to play in, they will create their own risks. If they are presented with something more risky, they take more care.’, and this struck home as an obvious truth: the more that we have had the chance to get to know ourselves as adults, the better the judgements we take – it makes perfect sense, therefore, that the more that children are exposed to situations where they have to develop independent judgements and learn to know their capacities, the more balanced and wise they are going to become.
I suspect that the university of the outdoors beckons!
