What Is Outdoor Education? Forest School, Bushcraft and Everything In Between

“Outdoor education” is one of those umbrella terms that means slightly different things depending on who’s using it. Schools use it to cover everything from a Duke of Edinburgh expedition to a single lesson taught in the playground. Parents use it to mean, roughly, “anything where my child comes home muddy.”

Forest school is one particular strand of outdoor education, with its own specific principles and training. But we get asked often enough how it relates to the wider field that it felt worth laying out clearly.

What outdoor education actually covers

At its broadest, outdoor education means any learning that happens outside a traditional classroom, using the outdoor environment as part of the teaching, not just as a change of scenery.

That’s a big tent. Under it you’ll find things like:

• Forest school, with its own six principles and dedicated practitioner training
• Bushcraft and survival skills, more focused on specific wilderness techniques than on child development
• Outdoor and adventurous activities, like climbing, canoeing, or expeditions
• Environmental and eco-education, focused on habitats, conservation, and sustainability
• Simple outdoor classroom teaching, where a normal lesson is just relocated outside
• Residential outdoor centres, offering multi-day programmes combining several of the above

They overlap constantly in practice. A good forest school session might touch on bushcraft skills like fire lighting, or environmental themes like a mini beast hunt. But the underlying philosophy differs, and it’s worth understanding why.

Where the idea comes from

Outdoor education as a formal concept has been around in the UK for decades, well before forest school arrived from Scandinavia in the 1990s. Residential outdoor centres, school camps, and Duke of Edinburgh expeditions were already established parts of British education by the mid-20th century.

Forest school is a newer, more specific philosophy layered on top of that older tradition. It borrowed the general idea that learning outdoors has value, but added its own structure: the six principles, the emphasis on regular sessions in one place, and a dedicated qualification pathway.

Understanding that history helps explain why the terms get used so loosely today. Outdoor education is the parent category. Forest school is one particular, quite specific, member of that family.

How forest school differs from bushcraft

This is probably the comparison we’re asked about most, because the two get lumped together a lot.

Bushcraft is generally skills-first. The goal is usually competence: can you build a shelter, purify water, light a fire without matches. It’s brilliant, and we teach elements of it ourselves, but the primary aim is the skill itself.

Forest school is child-first. The activities, including fire lighting and shelter building, are a means to an end: confidence, resilience, and holistic development. The skill matters less than what the child gets from attempting it.

In practice this shows up in small ways. A bushcraft instructor might correct a knot because it’s structurally wrong. A forest school leader is more likely to let a wobbly shelter stand, because the child built it themselves and that mattered more than the shelter surviving the night.

That’s not a criticism of bushcraft, by the way. Plenty of participants go on to bushcraft courses precisely because forest school gave them the confidence and interest to want to go deeper into the skills (especially if they loved the tools element!).

How forest school differs from a school’s outdoor lessons

Schools increasingly teach curriculum subjects outdoors, and that’s a great development. A geography lesson on rivers held actually at a river makes obvious sense, and outdoor maths or literacy sessions are becoming much more common.

But a single relocated lesson isn’t forest school, by the formal definition. Forest school is meant to be a regular, ongoing process in the same space over time, not an occasional outdoor day tacked onto an indoor curriculum.

Schools are running proper forest school sessions alongside their normal outdoor lessons, and the two complement each other rather than compete. The curriculum-linked outdoor lesson teaches a topic outside. The forest school session builds something longer term, around confidence and relationship with a place rather than a specific subject.

How forest school differs from residential outdoor centres

Residential centres, the sort schools visit for a week in Year 6, offer a different kind of outdoor education again: concentrated, varied, and usually a one-off rather than an ongoing relationship.

A residential week might include climbing, canoeing, orienteering, and a campfire, all run by instructors the children have just met, in a place they’ll likely never return to. It’s a brilliant, intense experience, but it’s structurally the opposite of forest school’s slow, repeated, same-place approach.

Both have real value. They’re just answering different questions: a residential centre answers “what can we pack into one memorable week,” while forest school answers “what happens if children return to the same wood, with the same leader, all year.”

Common outdoor education activities, by approach

It’s easier to see how these strands differ once you line up what actually happens in each. Here’s a rough guide to what you’d typically find under each banner.

Forest school activities usually include:

• Fire lighting and cooking on an open fire
• Den and shelter building
• Whittling and simple tool use
• Mini beast hunts and nature identification
• Free play with natural materials

Bushcraft activities usually include:

• Shelter building to a specific, tested standard
• Water purification and foraging
• Fire lighting by friction, not just matches or a striker
• Navigation and tracking
• Knife and axe skills, taught to a technical standard

Residential outdoor centre activities usually include:

• Climbing and abseiling
• Canoeing or kayaking
• High ropes and zip lines
• Orienteering and team challenges
• Evening activities like campfires or night walks

Environmental and eco-education activities usually include:

• Habitat surveys and pond dipping
• Composting and growing food
• Litter picking and conservation projects
• Weather and seasonal change tracking

What the research says about outdoor education generally

You don’t need us to tell you mud is good for children, but it’s worth knowing the wider evidence base supports outdoor learning specifically, not just “being outside is nice.”

Research consistently links regular outdoor learning to:

• Improved physical development, particularly gross motor skills and balance, from navigating uneven natural terrain
• Better self-regulation and reduced anxiety, linked to time in green and natural spaces
• Stronger engagement with curriculum topics when they’re taught in a real, sensory context rather than from a worksheet
• Improved social skills and cooperation, particularly in activities that require children to work together on a shared task

Forest school specifically has its own growing body of UK research behind it, much of it focused on the confidence and resilience benefits that come from the “supported risk” element, rather than outdoor learning in general.

Do the labels and distinctions matter?

Honestly, for most families, the label matters less than whether the activity is well run, safe, and something your child enjoys. Nobody needs to interrogate a lovely afternoon of den building to check it satisfies all six forest school principles.

Where it does matter is when you’re choosing something regular and paying for it. If you want the specific benefits forest school is built around, gradual confidence and resilience built over a long-term relationship with one outdoor space, it’s worth checking the setting is actually running forest school rather than an occasional outdoor activity day using the same language.

Questions worth asking:

• Is this a one-off session or does the group return to the same site regularly?
• Does the leader hold a forest school qualification (Level 3, specifically) rather than a general outdoor activities certificate?
• Is risk-taking genuinely supported, or is the session more tightly scripted?
• Is the same group of children returning each week, building a relationship with the place and each other?

If you’re weighing up outdoor options for your child or your school, it’s less about finding the “correct” one and more about matching the approach to what you actually want out of it. A once-a-year adventure day and a weekly forest school session aren’t competing for the same job, and most children benefit from having access to both across their childhood, rather than one instead of the other.

How schools can bring more outdoor education into ordinary term time

You don’t need a residential trip or a dedicated forest school partnership to get more outdoor learning into a school week, though both are worth having if budget allows.

Smaller, regular steps that schools we know that have found effective:

• Taking one curriculum lesson per week outside when the subject allows it, geography and science lend themselves well to this
• Setting up a simple outdoor learning area on site, even a modest one, for regular short sessions
• Partnering with a local forest school provider for a termly block of sessions, rather than a single one-off day
• Building in unstructured outdoor break time, not just structured lessons, since free outdoor play carries its own benefits

The schools that get the most out of it tend to treat outdoor learning as a regular thread through the year, rather than a single “outdoor day” that ticks a box and gets forgotten about until the next one.

Frequently asked questions

A few things we’re asked often enough to answer directly.

Is outdoor education part of the National Curriculum? There’s no single mandated “outdoor education” subject, but outdoor learning supports many curriculum areas directly, particularly science, geography, and PE, and Ofsted looks favourably on schools that use it well.

What age can children start outdoor education? There’s no fixed minimum. Forest school in particular works from nursery age right through to secondary school, with activities adjusted for developmental stage rather than a strict age cutoff.

Do you need special insurance for outdoor education? Any provider running sessions with children should hold public liability insurance, and school partnerships typically require this to be confirmed in writing before sessions begin.

Is outdoor education only for schools, or can families do it independently? Plenty of what falls under outdoor education, nature walks, den building in a local wood, simple foraging, can be done as a family with no formal provider at all. Forest school specifically, with its trained leadership and structured principles, is where you’d look for a professional provider.