When Kate Milman was 21, she paused her English degree at the University of East Anglia to join protests against the Newbury bypass. It was 1996, and the road was being carved out through idyllic wooded countryside in Berkshire. She took up residence in a treehouse, in the path of the bulldozers, and lived there for months. It was a revelation. She lived intimately with the catkins, the calling birds, the slow-slow-fast change in the seasons. Despite being in a precarious position as a protester, she felt completely safe and her brain was calmed.
“You know when you go camping and go back to your house, and everything feels wrong? The lighting is harsh and everything seems complicated indoors. It just got under my skin, this feeling – that [living in the woods] is like being at home.”
Finally, however, she was evicted from her forest heartland. The men and their machines arrived beneath her tree. Kate was arrested under a newly created “aggravated trespass” law and barred from joining the protests again. The wood was ripped apart.
“That level of grief – it felt like losing somebody,” Kate says now. It was a highly complex woodland and she had come to know it intimately. “I knew how beautiful it was at dawn and at full moon, and then it was bulldozed. When you watch that amount of stupidity, when you have that much grief and impotence, what can you do with it?”
The idea for Wild Things, a workers’ cooperative set up to provide children with experience of the natural world, was born. For three days each week, she and her fellow co-op members, Kath, Kat and Nick (her partner), provide half-day sessions for groups of nine pupils from various city schools.
I’ve come to a Wild Things day at Bestwood Country Park, a hilltop woodland on the edge of Nottingham. The wind runs through the canopy in waves, worrying the leaves, but it is calm and snug in the green, brambly understorey. The slender trunks of silver birches shine in the low sunlight.
We are both layered in the warm, shapeless garb of the forest school practitioner. From the moment formal, government-provided schooling began in the Victorian era, dissenters have championed alternative forms of education based outdoors, which have placed the health and creativity of the child at their heart. “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 after teachers visited outdoor schools in Denmark. 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.
When I talk to people about forest schooling, everyone agrees that it’s 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 children we’re with today are mostly 10-year-olds, members of an “English as a second language” group from Forest Fields primary and nursery school. The school’s bucolic name belies its location in central Nottingham. Its 620 children speak 52 languages. Everyone in today’s group arrived in Britain in the last two years. Several started school only two months ago. They are from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Romania and Syria, and some came from refugee camps. “You don’t know what they’ve seen,” says their teaching assistant, Yasmin Khaliq, who speaks five languages. She has been bringing groups to Wild Things for nine years. “It’s a godsend,” she says. “It’s all outdoors, they are seeing things with their own eyes, there’s no language barrier.”
From somewhere above us comes the anxious “cheeeept-cheeept” of a great spotted woodpecker. Then another call, carried on the wind. “Kooooo-eeeeeeeeee!”
Kate replies, with a completely unexpected volume: “Kooooo-eeeeeeeeee!”
The children have been allowed to run ahead, alone, through the woods, and they follow the sound of Kate’s call. I hear the heaving of a small pair of lungs before I see the boy, Mohammad, a slim child bent double with effort, legs flying out sideways like a skittish calf, eager to win his personal race. Next up the hill is a tiny, beaming Syrian girl. “I’m Amira, but you can call me Lion,” she grins.
All nine children are effervescent. I can’t banish the image of a group of puppies, bouncing around outdoors for the first time. Kate and I walk to the Wild Things base camp. The children scamper ahead, shimmying around brambles, poking around the site with the sharp-eyed curiosity of chickens, investigating branches, tree stumps and some interesting-looking clippers laid out on a tarpaulin.
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 with Nick and their eight-year-old son in a small rural housing co-op. They drive a battered high-top Transit stuffed with bow saws, loppers, clippers, ropes, tarpaulins, plastic mugs, hot chocolate and other essentials such as children’s wellies and woollen gloves: the pupils rarely bring clothes suitable for outdoors.
The children sit round the fire circle while Kate, Kath and Kat (“the three Ks”) show them how to use loppers and saws, and explain today’s activities. The pupils choose their own adventure. This child-led approach is intended to offer 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”, Kate says. Ten-year-olds “are at that stage of development where they need to feel liberated and free”.
Today the children can learn to use bows and arrows, build a fire and cook on it, or lay a trail, hide and have another group track them down. 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 constantly surprised by the infinite span of children’s creative thought and their willingness to express it in the woods: one boy decides to build a gym, another a mask; a girl spins stories – about a frog and a turtle crossing her path.
I join Kat and a trio of girls – keen little Amira; Homa, a Pakistani girl; and Cristina, a Roma Gypsy from Romania with a long plait, who wears a purple jumpsuit and a shiny purple padded jacket. She can’t speak much English but understands plenty.
Our mission is to lay a trail of arrows made from sticks through the wood to a spot where we will hide from the other members of the group.
“Like da?” says Cristina, fashioning an arrow from three large branches.
“Make it smaller?” suggests Kat.
“No. Big!” says Cristina.
Cristina gasps as we twist along a narrow path, passing a tree stump covered in gleaming bracket fungus. Beech leaves shine luminous orange on the forest floor. “Come on, guys!” says Cristina. Last week she didn’t talk at all, says Kat.
I struggle to break a large stick into arrow pieces. Homa laughs: “Cristina is stronger than you,” she says.
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. Meanwhile British-born city children belong to a country called Indoors: they ask Kate, “What’s mud?” or, “Why are there so many trees here?” It is often only in Britain that rural children from overseas are confined to city-centre flats. Their questions – “Are there elephants?” or, “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. “As soon as we light a fire, they say, ‘Ah, I know this’ or they point to a plant and get really animated. They are in their element.”
One group last spring included a partially sighted girl. “Walking up into the woods, she stopped and said, ‘Listen to that sound!’” remembers Kate. “It was the buzzing of the insects.” It reminded the girl of her former country. At the end of her six weeks, she said, “I feel like I’ve come home.” The Wild Things staff frequently hear similar declarations. “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 is everything, money is 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 return to the fire circle and the children discuss their plans for next week.
“Make a wood house,” says Sanaya. “I made a house with sticks in Pakistan. My grandma makes a fire like this.”
It reminds her of home? “Yes.”
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.”
Cristina is the most reluctant to leave.
“Next time, again?” she asks Kate, looking worried. Kate counts on her fingers to show Cristina seven days.
Cristina’s face lengthens at the prospect of such a long wait, but she joins the rest of the group hurtling back down the hill to their minibus heading for the city, and their new homes.
Kate and her fellow 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. Already today, on her second of six sessions, Sanaya was saying, “I know I won’t come back because my family haven’t got a car.” 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 there’s no cafe in the woods. It will be a very strong-willed 10-year-old who makes her own way here, and an act of faith for her parents to follow her.
Wild Things know their work enhances the children’s lives but, as Kate points out, “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.”
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, and a growing body of evidence pointing to the specific benefits of outdoor schooling.
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 that included PE lessons, and 2.7 times greater than on “inactive” school days. Scandinavian studies of outdoor schools have also found they improve children’s attentiveness. In 2017, a four-year study from Norway identified more inattention and hyperactivity symptoms the less time children spent at an outdoor preschool.
Perhaps most surprisingly, there is also hard 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 acutely 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. She thinks for a moment. At least the children now know the woods are there. The place may call to them at any point in the future. “It’s better to know there’s a bit missing. It might be something you can use in your later life,” she says. “To know that the woods can make you feel better.”
• Some names have been changed.
Wild Child by Patrick Barkham is published by Granta at £16.99. To order a copy for £12.99, go to guardianbookshop.com.
