Earlier this week, I dropped my kids off at a day camp in a park in London and then congratulated myself all the way home. The summer holiday is long and camp programmes are expensive, and when you sign up for one, there is a hard-to-resist expectation that the kids will be not only entertained but improved – physically (swimming lessons), morally (team games – specifically rounders) and, in the case of the camp we signed up for, spiritually. By which, of course, I refer to two sacred words in the middle-class lexicon: forest school.
I should say I’m completely down with the broad mission of forest school. Adults and children are improved by spending time in nature; studies and experience show this. There is a difference, however, between forest school the movement, a laudable push to get kids learning outside based on ideas that stretch back to the 19th century and popularised in the 1950s by, of course, the Scandinavians, and forest school, the modern marketing and business initiative. It reminds me of the catnip status latterly occupied by Mandarin lessons in the New York state primary system, which, when my three-year-olds started pre-school in 2018 – one of them still wearing pull-ups – saw them slogging each week through a mandatory class. There is nothing wrong with learning Mandarin, but it is perhaps not a priority for people who can’t use the toilet yet.
In a school setting, the point of these curriculum add-ons is to attract wealthy parents wavering between sending their kids public or private, or to lure them to the less popular state schools in the neighbourhood. At the two state elementary schools my kids attended in the US, the opening statement made by each principal welcoming new parents was, inevitably, “Thank you for sending your children to public school.” In the UK, this messaging is more discreet – but in London at least, where enrolment in the state primaries is down and many schools are at risk of funding deficit or closure, the same anxiety exists. Forest school, which according to the Forest School Association has boomed since the pandemic, appears to me to be part of the fightback.
Based on the tours of London primaries I did earlier this year, the presence of “forest school” in any given curriculum can mean one of two things. It’s either a genuine forest school offering, in which the kids spend at least one day a week outside, thanks to the school being near a large park. Or, just as frequently, it’s a piece of signalling to parents that the school understands and endorses “forest school” as a vibe, even if its implementation involves kids sitting in a lean-to in the playground for 45 minutes a week, or occupying a tiny fenced-off corner of the playground featuring two planters and a tree. I don’t blame the schools for this but, just as the Mandarin my kids learned was entirely pointless, given the provision evaporated the following year, so “forest school” in this context seems less to do with learning and more with selling.
As a result, there has shot up around forest school a slightly grifty atmosphere that is nowhere more present than among the private providers, who are extremely aware that forest school promises something not only healthy and fun, but a chance to turn your tiny child into Wordsworth considering the sublime. “Oh, look,” I said to my kids last week, as we tried to figure out what to do with them. “Forest school!” Just saying the words made me feel wholesome in a way that “multi-sports camp” did not. And while it was expensive, what better way to occupy your kids than placing them in a scheme that, per the advertising, promises to teach them how to survive outside, identify things in nature, build forts out of twigs and tie knots?” “Why do we need to know how to tie knots?” asked one of my kids, the answer to which, obviously, was: pipe down, you’ll thank me, come the zombie apocalypse.
And look, it was fine. They got fresh air. They picked berries. They spent the day outdoors, although most of it entailed loafing about in a clearing sitting on tree stumps, entirely unoccupied by the people running the thing, which is why I pulled them out after one day. It was outdoor babysitting and I’m OK with that, if it’s reflected in the cost and that’s how it’s sold. As an example of “forest school,” however, it was, in keeping with a subcategory of this generally admirable trend – whisper it – kinda bullshit.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
