Despite having a middle-class reputation, an outdoor school near Nottingham is reconnecting disadvantaged 10-year-olds with nature and a sense of freedom.

The idea of Wild Things is to attempt to provide children with the experience of being in nature. It was created by a nature advocate Kate Milman, after she was evacuated from a wood in which she was protesting and which was later taken down by bulldozers in Berkshire. The implementation of the idea began by the lecturing 9 pupils from different cities by Kate and two co-op members, three times a week.

Parents are taking a stand

“Forest school”, a specific type of outdoor schooling with an emphasis on imaginative play in a forest setting and a fire circle, developed in Britain in the 1990s following a visit to outdoor schools in Denmark by British teachers. It has flourished in the last two decades without state support, as parents react against the rigid, test-based learning imposed by government reforms and the national curriculum.

Down-side: “Middle-Class”

People agree that out-door forest schools are very important to help children “connect” with the natural world. But, they often say, it’s terribly middle class and white, isn’t it?

The pupils of the school are 10-year-olds, members of an “English as a second language” group from Forest Fields primary and nursery school. They are 620 children who speak 52 languages. They arrived in Britain in the last two years mostly from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Romania and Syria. Some of them came from refugee camps, and they are mostly in need for freedom and a better reality that could distract them from what they have gone through in camps.

Funding needed

On the days Kate doesn’t take children on camps, she “scrats around” for charitable funding because, mostly, the only way to get pupils from cash-strapped state schools into the woods is to offer the sessions free. The Wild Things staff survive on a minuscule co-op “share” wage. Kate lives a humble life with her family trying to make the Forest School survive while bringing aids to children herself, varying from food, to clothing.

Liberal creative activities:

Sitting around a fire, the pupils choose their own adventure. This child-led approach offers an alternative to conventional didactic, adult-led education, which misses “that whole chunk of experience where children are just getting to be a wild animal”, says Kate.

Children can learn to use bows and arrows, build a fire and cook on it, or lay a trail, play hide and seek among trees. The activities, says Kate when we break for lunch, are really giving them an excuse to mooch and dream in the forest. No two children respond to the place in the same way. Kate and her colleagues are surprised by the infinite span of children’s creative thought and their willingness to express it in the woods.

Children can feel at home in the woods in a way they find more difficult in the community they have landed in

I assumed that most refugees have come to the UK from cities, but Wild Things has worked with many migrant children who grew up in rural areas. It is often only in Britain that rural children from overseas are confined to city-centre flats. One of their questions: “Are there deadly snakes here?” are rooted in experience of their countries of origin. For many, Kate says, the woods awaken lost memories and a yearning for home.

It's their genuine home

The Wild Things staff frequently hear declarations from children such as: “I feel like I’ve come home.” Often children can feel at home in the woods in a way they find more difficult in the community they have landed in where technology and money are everything, they are at the bottom of the pecking order and there are massive tensions in the area. In the woods they are on a level playing field. They can just be kids again.

We help a child to fall in love with nature and we don’t know if they will ever be able to access it again

What is the best thing about the wood? “Everything,” says Homa. “Hide-and-seek, the fire, the bread, because that makes us all hot.”

This prompts Adnan to reminisce about Syria. “I used to like playing with my cousins. It was just like this but with less trees.”

Kate and the Wild Things workers often feel the weight of the children’s longing to stay in the woods. “They constantly say things like, ‘I feel so free out here,’” she says. After the six weeks, Wild Things give every child a leaflet with bus routes, showing how they can reach the forest from Nottingham. But the bus drops them in the nearest village and they have to walk through the woods, it is quite tricky to get here.

Kate points out that “It’s very hard to measure improvements in confidence, self-esteem, friendships, behaviour. Sometimes you do see something tangible, other times you don’t. That’s not to say it’s not happening.”

Poor-funding

Forest school is still relatively new, educational research is poorly funded and a child’s achievement is shaped by myriad circumstances that make it difficult for academics to control for every confounding factor. But there is an enormous weight of scientific research demonstrating the benefits of wild green space for adult mental and physical wellbeing.

A better growth

The physical gains are easiest to measure. In one study, a group of Scottish nine-11-year-olds were fitted with accelerometers to measure their physical activity during a typical school day and during a day at forest school. These revealed that activity levels were 2.2 times greater during forest school days than on normal school days. In 2017, a four-year study from Norway identified more inattention and hyperactivity symptoms the less time children spent at an outdoor preschool.

Academic improvement

There is an evidence that outdoor schooling can produce better academic outcomes. A three-year study of primary school pupils who were “struggling to thrive” found a group who attended weekly forest school sessions achieved better overall attendance than their primary school-only peers, and markedly better attainment. The forest school pupils’ writing improved by 18% compared with 7% among comparably disadvantaged pupils; reading improved by 27%, compared with 22% among school-only children; and maths attainment rose by 27% compared with 11%.

Even so, forest school teachers are aware that they offer only a tiny taste of magic in childhoods where more time is spent indoors than in any preceding generation. “We help a child to fall in love with nature and we don’t know if they’ll ever be able to access it again,” Kate says. But she is relieved that the children “Know that the woods can make you feel better.”

Childhub

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