Photo: Baciu Cristian Mihai | Unsplash
Forest schools, a Scandinavian pedagogical innovation, were first imported into Britain in 1993 by educators who visited Denmark and saw the benefits of unstructured play and exploration. During the pandemic, however, demand for forest school placement has mushroomed in the UK, although there are still only 108 certified forest school practitioners in the country. Richard Irvine, 51, began forest schooling 25 years ago, and he is suddenly in great demand, having just published Forest School for Grown-Ups. Irvine believes, though, that forest school is becoming neo-liberalized. It's become a bit of a brand as much as an ethos, he says. It's growing among the very aspirational Cornish-holiday type of parents. The challenge now is to keep it from being co-opted and morphing into a forest lite version of the original concept.
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