Our History
We have been running a number of forest school sessions for the past 5 years, forest school is an outdoor learning concept with a heavy focus on the protection of child-led play. There are 6 key principles to forest school which as a provision we adhere to, one is long term access to the programme, and another is that the sessions take place in a "woodland, or natural environment".
Our Situation
Unfortunately, we have been given notice to leave current forest school woodland site in July 2024. Leaving us without a space to be able to continue our provision past this date.
Our Offerings
In the last 4 years we have been here, our provision has grown and developed into a Forest School Nursery, that accepts government funded places. A very popular school holiday club, a home-education group learning programme. Stay & plays for parents and carers with babies, toddlers and young children. Birthday parties, school trips, college and school students visiting, CPD for teachers and other childcare professionals.
We also offer a lot of provision to children with SEND needs, particuarly we offer 1:1 short breaks provision in the school holiday club which has been a lifeline for many children & families.
More recently we began to offer therapeutic provision for children that are struggling with their social, emotional and mental health, and others with additional needs that are currently not accessing any form of schooling due to many factors. This has been a lifeline for so many families and being outdoors in nature many children who may have sufferred extreme trauma can process their experiences and live a happy childhood, still being able to socialise with peers and learn outdoors.
Our Staff Team
We are now a company with 15 employees, many of our staff have completely changed career to be Forest School Leaders, we have invested financially in lots of training, and we are very passionate about how nature, nurtures children's development and childhood experiences. We strive to provide an alternative to mainstream education and believe that children develop life-long skills with access to forest school programmes
Our Project
We lease areas of a green space site in Denton, we want to continue being able to run, however to move here would be a complete re-location for us and we may sadly lose many of our local families, and customers. We are unsure as yet on how this will impact our sustainability as a buisiness. The green space has few trees and little canopy shelter, in order to continue our current offerrings we need to develop the trees & shrubs with lots of planting, as well as build some outdoor classroom canopy areas to provide children with shelter in bad weather. We also need to erect some more secure and robust fencing in order to prevent vandalism that we have endured here in the past, along with making the area secure and safe for the children.
Our plea to you
We are passionate about being able to continue all the offerrings we currently offer at our site in Cheadle and so are hoping to raise money to be able to develop our amazing provision and continue to offer an outdoor education that benefits the mental, physical and emotional health of our future generation. As well as continuing to teach children to respect and care for our natural world. We would really really value the support of the local community, our current (and hopefully future!) families. We truly appreciate any donations that can be made to support our cause.