What is Schola Foris?

It's Latin for "classroom out of doors". Which just about sums us up. It's our belief that whatever you learn indoors, you can learn outdoors, with the added benefits of feeling integral to our natural world, and primarily using resources that the natural world offers our learning.


Schola Foris is primarily a forest school provider, offering forest school programmes for children and young people of all ages, either in their own educational setting, a local woodland, or our own beautiful wood near Macclesfield, Cheshire.


Our forest school programmes, run over several weeks offer children opportunities to develop self confidence, increase self esteem, acquire practical lifelong useful skills, and to explore their inherent creativity and enquiring natures in a natural woodland setting.  We aim to broaden children's horizons, engender a love of nature and the outdoors and provide deep experiential learning opportunities which are based on their own personal intrinsic motivations.


Chances to play, exercise, learn, grow, laugh, share and reflect are all part of a Schola Foris forest school programme. Our aim is to give children the freedom, in nature, to have flexible, knowledgeable, trained adult support, scaffolding their own self-initiated learning.


We provide an environment in which children can stretch themselves physically, socially, emotionally and intellectually, each according to their own need and personal stage of development. We are passionate believers that all children learn best when their levels of well being are high. It is key to our offering that every child, as part of a Schola Foris forest school programme, develops both a strong sense of well being and self worth and that all children understand how to engender this in other children around them.


As well as our commitment to the pedagogy and ethos attributable to forest school, we support teachers, trainers and home educators in extending their children's learning by taking their classroom out of doors... It really doesn't have to be scary! 


Nor do we eschew the modern day world, fully believing that appropriate use of information and communication technology can not only assist learning, but also allow us to further engage children in the understanding of the natural world with technology that is increasingly becoming the norm for children.  So we're definitely not averse to blogging from the woods, geocacheing , or using smart phone apps for information, research as well as exploring the use of age appropriate social media to often add a global perspective to our schola foris.