Forest School Curriculum: A 24-Week UK Planning Guide

Someone has asked you for a written forest school curriculum. Then you open the Forest School Association's planning guidance and read that a session should show an absence of curriculum drivers and minimal adult direction. The document your headteacher wants and the ethos your Level 3 taught you look like they pull in opposite directions.

They do not, but almost nobody writes down how to hold both. This guide does. You get six skill strands, a progression map from EYFS to Year 6, a 24-week programme skeleton built on the FSA's own criteria, EYFS and National Curriculum links, what evidence of progress looks like, and what it all costs in the UK.

If you are not running sessions yet, start with our guide on how to start a forest school and come back to this once you have a site and a group.

What a forest school curriculum actually is

A forest school curriculum is a long-term plan for the skills, environment and progression a group will be offered across a programme, not a schedule of activities to deliver. It sets out what becomes possible, in roughly what order, across at least 24 weeks, and leaves the question of what happens in any given session to the learners.

That single distinction is the whole thing. A scheme of work commits you to content on a date. A forest school curriculum commits you to conditions: the site, the skills on offer, the risks a learner can earn access to, and the way you will notice change.

The Forest School Association's guidance on session and programme planning opens with Eisenhower: plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. The preparation is what lets you respond well when a group finds a dead badger, or the wind takes the tarp down, or six children spend ninety minutes on one hole in the ground. Write the enabling conditions. Leave the activities alone.

This is a different discipline to the one you use for a fixed-outcome programme like a holiday camp, where the schedule genuinely is the product. Both are curricula. Only one of them can be planned week by week in advance.

The six principles your curriculum has to satisfy

Every credible forest school document defers to the same six principles. Most explainers restate them. More useful is knowing what each one forces you to put in writing, because that is what an inspector, a governor or a headteacher will look for. These are drawn from the FSA's full principles and criteria for good practice.

1. A long-term process. This is the criterion with hard numbers attached, and the one most settings fail. Your curriculum has to cover at least 24 consecutive weeks across one year spanning two seasons, or 12 consecutive weeks a year over two years spanning two seasons, or fortnightly provision across the full academic year for classes over 15. Sessions run at least fortnightly, each a minimum of two hours, with the same group of learners throughout. Six enrichment afternoons in July is not a forest school programme.

2. A woodland or natural environment. Not just an address. The FSA expects a site management plan, including the species present and how you monitor your own impact on them. Write down what you will do about compaction on the main path, where firewood comes from, and which areas rest.

3. Supported risk taking. Your document needs a risk-benefit progression, not a ban list. Frame it as what a learner earns access to and on what evidence, alongside the site risk assessment, daily risk assessments and dynamic risk assessment statement the FSA expects you to hold.

4. Development across the whole person. Name outcomes across physical, social, cognitive, linguistic, emotional and spiritual development. Write in that behaviour is treated as communication, because that line is what stops a wobbly session being read as a failed one.

5. Qualified practitioners. An accredited Level 3 Forest School qualification, gained face to face. A current 16-hour outdoor first aid qualification with scenario-based learning relevant to the ages in your care. At least one day of face-to-face forest school CPD a year. DBS checks for every adult. Put the certificate expiry dates in the document. If you or a colleague still need the qualification, our guide to forest school training explains the routes and levels.

6. A learner-centred community. Reflection built into every session, and the words play and choice appearing in the curriculum itself. If a reader cannot find them, the document is a scheme of work wearing a coat.

The paperwork set that sits behind it

The curriculum is one document in a folder. The FSA expects the folder to also contain a site risk assessment, daily risk assessments, risk-benefit assessments, a dynamic risk assessment statement, a health and safety policy, emergency plans, a site management plan with species and impact monitoring, and a forest school handbook covering ethos, safeguarding, anti-bullying procedures, data protection and complaints. Build it once, review it termly.

The six strands to build progression around

Schools that publish credible forest school curricula almost all land on the same structure: a small number of skill strands, each with descriptors that get more demanding across the key stages. Six covers the ground without turning into a spreadsheet nobody opens.

1. Woodland safety and self-care. Boundaries, the call-in signal, kit for the weather, looking after yourself for two hours outside.
2. Shelter, knots and construction. From balancing sticks to lashing a frame that stands up in wind.
3. Tool use. Palm drills and peelers through to bow saws, knives and the judgement to pick the right one.
4. Fire. Circle behaviour first, fire lighting much later, fire management later still.
5. Nature knowledge and stewardship. Identification, seasonal change, food chains, and leaving the site better.
6. Collaboration, communication and reflection. Sharing a tool, negotiating a role, facilitating a circle.

A strand is a readiness ladder, not a delivery order. A child can arrive at strand four in week three because that is where their interest took them, and sit at strand one for a term because two hours outdoors in January is genuinely hard for them. The ladder tells you what to offer next. It does not tell you when. Our list of forest school outdoor learning ideas is a useful bank to draw invitations from once you know which rung a group is on.

A forest school progression map, EYFS to Year 6

Here is the asset. Six strands across four stages, written generically so you can lift it into your own document and edit the descriptors to match your site and group.

Three notes on using it, because a table like this goes wrong quickly.

It is a map of what you offer, not a list of what every child must do. Twenty-four cells completed for every learner is not the target, and chasing it turns a child-led programme into a filing exercise.

Cells are not gates in a fixed order within a stage. Fire circle behaviour comes before fire lighting for obvious reasons, but a Year 2 child who is ready for a bow saw and a Year 5 child who is not are both entirely normal, and your risk-benefit assessment should be able to say so in writing.

Adapt the descriptors to your site. A curriculum written around veteran oaks and a stream reads very differently to one written around six birches on a school field, and yours should name what you actually have.

Mapping the strands to the EYFS and the National Curriculum

This is the table you produce when leadership asks what forest school is for. It is a justification document, not a planning document, and the difference matters.

All seven EYFS areas of learning appear across the six strands, which is worth stating explicitly in your document. The EYFS statutory framework already expects providers to give children access to outdoor activity daily wherever possible, so a forest school programme is not an add-on to early years provision. It is one of the strongest ways of delivering it, and our collection of forest school activities for early years shows what the EYFS column of the progression map looks like in practice. For the primary side, the relevant statutory topics sit in the National Curriculum programmes of study for science, geography, design and technology, English, maths and PE.

Now the warning nobody prints. The mapping table is there to make the case upstairs. The moment it starts choosing your sessions, the programme stops being forest school. You are not going to the wood to cover rocks and soils in week 14. You go, and children dig, and rocks and soils gets evidenced. Keep the map in the appendix and let it work backwards.

That framing also helps when forest school is being positioned inside a wider offer. Our piece on what enrichment means in school is useful if you are being asked to justify the time in curriculum hours.

A 24-week programme skeleton across two seasons

The FSA gives you the length. It does not give you the shape. Here is a skeleton in four blocks of six weeks, with a purpose per block rather than an activity per week, which is the level of detail a forest school curriculum should actually commit to.

Weeks 1 to 6: settling

Boundaries, the call-in signal, and the fire circle as a routine before it is ever a fire. Free play dominates. Your job is baseline observation, and practitioners give it a full block: commonly around six weeks of half-day sessions, or about a week of full days. Introduce nothing that needs a tool. You are learning who this group is, and they are learning that the wood is theirs.

Weeks 7 to 12: skills open up

Tools go out to the learners showing readiness, one strand at a time and one child at a time. First shelters. First fires, once circle behaviour is reliable. Interests from the first block start driving how you set the site up before each session. This is where the strand ladder begins to earn its place.

Weeks 13 to 18: depth and the season turning

Projects start carrying across sessions instead of being dismantled at the end of each one. If you have planned the calendar well, the season changes inside this block, so the site itself does the teaching: the same patch of ground in October and January is the clearest lesson in seasonal change you will ever run. Longer builds, deeper identification work, more sustained collaboration.

Weeks 19 to 24: ownership

Learners lead elements. Older children teach a safe carry to younger ones. The group takes on a stewardship task on the site, something that stays after they leave. Reflection gets more structured and more theirs. Close the block with a session that looks back across all 24 weeks, using photographs and their own words.

The two other shapes the FSA allows

Twenty-four consecutive weeks is out of reach for a lot of settings, and the FSA knows it. Twelve consecutive weeks a year across two years, covering two seasons, suits primaries that can give one class a term of forest school and then bring the same children back the following year. Fortnightly provision across the full academic year is the option for classes over 15, and it is a common shape in maintained primaries, splitting a class into two groups on alternate weeks.

Be honest in your document about which one you are doing. Independent providers running weekly after-school and holiday blocks can usually hit 24 consecutive weeks. Maintained primaries with one leader and seven classes rarely can, and writing 24 weeks into a curriculum you cannot staff is worse than writing 12 and delivering it.

Planning one session so it stays child-led

The session shape below satisfies both an inspector and the ethos, which is the whole trick.

1. Arrival and site check. Adults sweep the site. Learners do a version of it too, which is strand one in action.
2. Opening circle. Register, weather, boundaries, anything new. Two or three minutes.
3. Free play. The majority of the session. Not a gap between activities, the point of it.
4. An invitation, not an instruction. Optional and ignorable by design.
5. Fire or snack. A fixed anchor in the middle or towards the end that the group can navigate by.
6. Closing reflection. A round, a thorn and a rose, one word each. Short and consistent.
7. Leader review notes. Fifteen minutes after they have gone, while it is still fresh.

The FSA names three inputs to planning, and they are all backward-looking: the observations you and your supporting adults made last session, the reflections those adults offer, and the cues coming from the site itself. Nothing in that list is a learning objective.

An invitation looks like this. Three children spent last week trying to hang a bucket from a branch and could not get it up there. Before this week's session you set a length of cordage, a hand drill and two short poles on the log near where they were working, and then you say nothing about it. If they walk past, that is a result too, and it tells you something. If you announce it, it stops being an invitation and becomes an activity, and the group's ownership of the idea goes with it.

That restraint is what separates this from ordinary session planning, and it is a skill in its own right. The adults who find it hardest are usually the ones who are best at leading from the front.

Observation and assessment without a tick-box culture

Most guidance on this says observe and reflect, then stops. Here is what the evidence actually looks like when someone asks to see it.

Start with a baseline. Six weeks of settling gives you it. Without a baseline you have no way of showing change, and a lot of forest school impact claims fall over at exactly this point.

Use more than one method. Anecdotal records for the moment that mattered. Running records when you want the sequence of what a child did over twenty minutes. Time samples when you are asking a specific question, such as how often a child initiates contact with a peer. Photographs. And learner voice, quoted verbatim, which is the most persuasive evidence in the whole folder and the one most often missing.

Keep individual records for key children. Not all of them, and not every week. The FSA expects leaders to hold individual observation records, and a small number kept properly beats a full set kept badly.

Show progression as narrative, not as a completed grid. Three narrated examples of one child across 24 weeks, each tied to a strand descriptor and dated, will convince a headteacher of more than a fully shaded matrix. The matrix invites the question of who filled it in and when. The narrative answers it.

Answer intent, implementation, impact. That is the frame leadership and inspectors work in. Intent is why this programme, for this group, now. Implementation is your strands and your 24-week calendar. Impact is observed change, in the learners' words as well as yours.

One legal point that catches providers out. Observation records that are photograph-heavy are personal data about children, and a photograph taken for your assessment folder is not automatically covered by a consent that mentioned the website. Get the wording right at sign-up. Our photo consent forms for activity organisers cover what the permission needs to say and how to record it.

On evidence more broadly, be careful what you claim. A 2024 study in the Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning found that attending 12 weekly forest school sessions improved mood and cooperation in 7 to 8-year-olds. One hundred and seventy-nine UK schoolchildren took part, with a final sample of 151 split between a forest school group and a classroom group. Children in the forest school group rated themselves less tired, less bored, calmer and happier. That is a useful result to quote, and our post on the benefits of forest school collects more of the evidence worth citing. Much of the older literature is weaker: small samples, practitioner self-report, and comparison groups that are not really comparable. Saying so in your document builds more credibility than another unsourced list of benefits, and it is why your own baseline matters.

What a forest school curriculum costs to run in the UK

Setting up from nothing, a single leader with a group kit lands somewhere between roughly £1,300 and £2,000 before insurance. Prices below were checked in August 2026 and will drift.

For what the kit budget actually needs to buy, strand by strand, see our guide to forest school resources.

Insurance sits on top and varies too much by setting to give a single figure. FSA Recognised Forest School Providers get liability insurance benefits through the association, including the admin fee waived in the first year and a discount on the annual policy.

What providers charge

The other side of the ledger, for anyone working out whether the training pays back. Specialist private providers charge £25 to £45 for a two-hour session and £80 to £150 for a full day. Community and school-linked programmes run at £5 to £25 per weekly session. Holiday programmes go for £150 to £350 for a week. London and the South East sit above those ranges and the north of England and Scotland below them, so check what comparable providers near you actually charge before you set a price.

Take £35 a session, the middle of the private range. A 24-week block for a group of eight brings in £6,720, several times what the setup costs. The constraint is rarely price. It is the ratio, which caps your group size hard. If you are weighing all of this up as a venture rather than a school programme, our forest school business plan guide turns these numbers into a full plan.

Funding routes

National Lottery Awards for All England makes grants from £300 to £20,000 for projects lasting up to two years, which is the right size and shape for site setup and a training place. The Ernest Cook Trust's Outdoor Essentials Grant gives £500 to primary and special schools and £1,000 to secondaries, and the trust runs a separate grant of up to £20,000 a year for charities and non-profits employing an outdoor learning leader. The CLA Charitable Trust goes up to £5,000 and names forest school type activities among what it funds. On the parent side, Tax-Free Childcare gives eligible families up to £2,000 per child per year towards registered provision, and early years entitlement funding covers 15 or 30 hours across 38 weeks for eligible children. If you are setting up as a provider rather than inside a school, our guide to setting up an after-school club in the UK covers registration, insurance and ratios in more detail.

The admin a 24-week programme actually generates

A long programme with the same group creates operational problems that no activity list mentions, and they are the reason forest school blocks fall apart in week nine rather than week one.

Registers you can take off-site. You need the register in a wood, on a phone, often with one bar of signal or none. Print it and it is out of date the moment someone messages you at 8am.

Medical, allergy and SEND information that travels. The information has to be with the leader, not in an office. An inhaler that is in the school building while the child is 400 metres into the trees is a live risk, not an admin problem.

Consent that covers what you actually do. Tools, fire, photographs and off-site travel each need explicit permission, and they need refreshing at the start of each block rather than once at enrolment.

Weather cancellations. Forest school runs in most weather but not all of it, and high winds in a woodland is the clearest cancellation criterion there is. Publish your policy up front, and decide before the season starts whether a cancelled session is refunded, credited or made up.

Re-enrolment at the end of every block. This is the one that quietly breaks the long-term principle. The FSA criterion depends on the same group returning, so a re-enrolment process that loses three families to admin friction has damaged your curriculum, not just your income.

Waiting lists. High ratios cap group size, so demand almost always exceeds places. Managing that well is how you fill the next block before it starts.

This is the part we build for. Our forest school booking software handles recurring block bookings, collects medical and consent information at sign-up so it sits against the child on your phone rather than in a filing cabinet, and gives you a register you can mark in the wood. Re-enrolment for the next block goes out to the same families with their details already attached.

Five mistakes that stop it being forest school

Writing a scheme of work and calling it a curriculum. If your document has a named activity against week 11, you have written the wrong thing. Rewrite it as conditions and progression.

Front-loading tools and fire. They photograph well and they impress parents, which is exactly why they get pulled forward. A group that cannot hold a boundary cannot hold a fire circle, and the first block exists to build that.

Treating the progression map as a checklist. The moment you are steering a child towards an empty cell so the grid looks complete, the programme has stopped being learner-centred and you have quietly become the curriculum driver.

Running six sessions and calling it a programme. Below the FSA thresholds it is outdoor learning, which is a perfectly good thing to run, and our bank of outdoor learning activities is built for exactly that. Just do not label it forest school in a document someone will check.

Skipping the site management plan. Compaction, firewood taken from the site, trampled ground flora, a fire circle that never moves. Two years in, the wood is worse than you found it and the reason for being there has gone with it.

Start with the conditions, not the activities

The document that satisfies a headteacher and the ethos that satisfies the FSA are the same document, as long as you write down the right things. Set out the site, the strands, the risk-benefit progression and the 24-week shape. Say how you will notice change and how you will evidence it. Then leave the activities to the group, every week, and let the observations tell you what to offer next.

Get the operational side off your plate at the same time. Registers, consent, medical information and re-enrolment for a 24-week block are the parts of a forest school programme that reliably eat evenings, and none of them need to.

Key takeaways

• A forest school curriculum plans the conditions, skills and progression on offer, not the activities in each session.
• The FSA's long-term criterion means 24 consecutive weeks over two seasons, 12 weeks a year across two years, or fortnightly across the academic year for classes over 15. Sessions are two hours minimum with the same group.
• Build progression around six strands: woodland safety, shelter and knots, tools, fire, nature knowledge, and collaboration. Treat the strand map as a readiness ladder, not a checklist.
• Map the strands to the EYFS and the National Curriculum to justify the provision upstairs, then keep the map out of your session planning.
• Assessment means a baseline, mixed observation methods, learner voice, and progression shown as narrative rather than a completed grid.
• Budget roughly £1,300 to £2,000 to set up one leader with a group kit, before insurance.

Forest school curriculum FAQs

Is there an official forest school curriculum in the UK?

No. The Forest School Association sets six principles and a set of criteria for good practice, not a syllabus. There is no national scheme of work, no approved activity list and no statutory content. That is deliberate, because the provision is meant to be led by the group and the site rather than by a document written elsewhere.

How many sessions make a forest school programme?

At minimum, 24 consecutive weeks across one year covering two seasons, or 12 consecutive weeks a year over two years covering two seasons, or fortnightly provision across the full academic year for classes over 15. Sessions run at least fortnightly and last at least two hours each, with the same group of learners throughout.

Do I need a Level 3 qualification to write a forest school curriculum?

To lead forest school, yes. The FSA requires an accredited Level 3 Forest School qualification gained face to face, plus a current 16-hour outdoor first aid qualification with scenario-based learning and an outdoor element. You can help write a curriculum without it, but the named leader delivering the programme needs the qualification.

Can forest school count towards the National Curriculum?

It maps to it well, particularly science, geography, design and technology, English and PE. Use the mapping to evidence coverage after the fact. If National Curriculum objectives start deciding what happens in each session, the programme no longer meets the learner-centred principle and stops being forest school.

What adult-to-child ratio should I plan for?

There is no statutory forest school ratio. The FSA position is that ratios are set by risk assessment against the needs of the participants, the site and the planned activities, with one additional adult on top. In practice most settings run tighter than their session ratio for tool and fire work, commonly around 1:6 for supervised tool use and 1:1 for fine cutting tools.

Does forest school work without a woodland?

Yes, if the site is a natural environment with trees and you can use it repeatedly. A copse on a school field, a community orchard or a scrubby corner of a park can all carry a full programme. What matters more than acreage is the site management plan: what grows there, what your impact is, and how you rotate use so the ground recovers.

How long should a forest school session be?

Two hours is the FSA minimum, with an exception for participants who have severe and complex additional needs. Half-day and full-day sessions are common for independent providers and holiday programmes. Anything under two hours does not leave enough time for the free play that the whole model depends on.

What paperwork do I need alongside the curriculum?

A site risk assessment, daily risk assessments, risk-benefit assessments, a dynamic risk assessment statement, a health and safety policy, emergency plans, a site management plan with species and impact monitoring, and a forest school handbook covering ethos, safeguarding, anti-bullying procedures, data protection and complaints. Most settings build the folder once and review it termly.

How do I show progression when the sessions are child-led?

Baseline the group over the first block, then track a small number of key children through dated, narrated observations tied to your strand descriptors. Three well-evidenced examples across 24 weeks, including the child's own words, demonstrate progression more convincingly than a completed grid, and they do not require you to steer anyone towards an outcome.

What does it cost to start running forest school in the UK?

Level 3 leader training runs £897 to £1,100, plus around £66 in awarding body fees and around £140 for outdoor first aid if it is not bundled. Add £105 to £215 for one leader's kit, or £196 to £630 for a group set-up kit, and £40 a year for FSA membership. That puts a realistic starting budget at roughly £1,300 to £2,000, with insurance on top.