Schools

We have been supporting children and young people to connect with nature and discover the wonders of the natural world over the last 30 years.  

Throughout this journey we’ve engaged 470 schools across Cheshire and Merseyside, working with teachers and school staff to enhance the outdoor offer for their pupils.

We works closely with schools across the area to improve pupils’ access to trees and woodlands on school sites and in their local communities. By working with teachers we help create more natural school grounds, through tree planting and habitat creation, to create fun and attractive learning environments that encourage nature-based learning.

By diversifying play areas on school grounds, children have the opportunity to explore different environments and habitats that encourages natural play, exploration and sparks their imagination.

Our tree planting grants can cover up to 100% of the cost of planting trees on school sites and our team can provide schools with expert design advice, support with planting and ensuring that plans are in place for long-term management and use by children.

As part of our woodland creation projects, our Community Forester will engage pupils in the initial planting of the trees and direct teachers to resources and follow up activities that can be used with the planted trees, to support pupils learning and increase their awareness of the benefits of outdoor spaces.

We’ve delivered various education programmes with schools over the last 30 years, including: 

• Trees for Learning
• Thrive in the Forest
• The Big Tree Plant 
• Forest Schools
• Urban GreenUP 

We continue to work with Liverpool John Moores University’s Natural Curriculum Hub, providing free training to support teachers to explore learning outdoors through the Natural curriculum practitioner programme.  Find out more about the Natural Curriculum Hub.

By helping teachers to develop their own subject knowledge about the natural environment, we can help teachers increase their confidence to teach sessions to their own pupils, providing meaningful learning experiences for their pupils whilst fulfilling the requirements for Age Related Expectations.

Research shows that learning outdoors has a wide range of benefits for pupils and teachers, with many schools saying that it has transformed the way they deliver their lessons.

Some of the benefits of outdoor learning include:

• Increasing pupils’ physical activity
• Reducing stress and anxiety
• Increasing pupils’ wellbeing
• Helping children connect with nature and understand the natural environment
• Providing a positive impact on pupils’ behaviour
• Improving teachers’ health and wellbeing
• Increasing pupil academic attainment.

Engaging young people with the outdoor environment is often seen as a nice to have and is often secondary to the needs of meeting the curriculum. Through the work on the Voices of the Future Project, The Mersey Forest are developing further workshops to train teachers how to deliver the curriculum content outside and break down barriers any perceived barriers to learning outdoors. Through this training, it is hoped that the amount of curriculum learning outdoors will increase and offer all of the above benefits to all school pupils and result in young people finding outdoor spaces to be places of enjoyment and learning increasing their connection to the outdoors spaces The Mersey Forest are creating.