The idea of letting children experiment with knives and fire might sound scary, but safety is paramount at School Outdoors Dulwich. All of our staff have essential safety training such as risk assessment and food hygiene. 

Although children are encouraged to assess risk for themselves, this is always with close adult guidance. Before an activity, we’ll sit in a circle and talk about how the children think they can stay safe. We do a lot of safety talks before they use any tools, and supervision is tight, with adults observing each child and tailoring the activity to their own ability. Staffing levels are high, too: for some activities, children are even supervised one-to-one.

Children who are used to playing outdoors are far less likely to injure themselves. They have developed a natural risk assessment process and are more stable and understanding of their capabilities than children who do not often spend time in such an environment.

We do however have an evacuation plan (as all nurseries do) for emergencies or incidents. In case of an accident a first aider will attend to your child whilst another member of staff will go to meet medical staff if necessary, to bring them to the site. Alternatively, for less serious situations, we will take your child back to our main site and treat them there. 

The person responsible for reporting accidents, incidents or near misses is the member of staff who saw the incident or was first to find the child where there are no witnesses. They must record it on an Accident Form through the child’s EY Log and report it to the nursery manager. Other staff who have witnessed the accident may also countersign the form and, in more serious cases, provide a statement. This should be done as soon as the accident is dealt with, whilst the details are still clearly remembered. The staff member who writes the accident form must submit it to be reviewed by their head of room. Parents must be sent the Accident Report immediately after it’s reviewed, informed of any first aid treatment given and asked to submit it back to the nursery.

At School Outdoors Dulwich we operate in a fully fenced site. To ensure safety, our staff work upon lower ratios (as opposed to the standard nursery ratios of 1:8 or 1:13 for those settings employing highly qualified teachers as we do). With low ratios the children are always within immediate line of sight and proximity to a staff member, always within our boundary.

Further to this a key safeguarding practise is the games we regularly play with the children such as one-two-three where are you or one-two-three run to me, both of which encourage the children through play and therefore without feeling trepidation to understand the importance of staying within our boundaries and family groupings.

We play!! Remaining warm and dry is the most important element to create happiness and creative play regardless of the weather. Whilst the woods themselves afford shelter, we also have large, lightweight tarps that we rig up to provide windbreaks and extra protection when we don’t want to let a sudden downpour disrupt our games. We find that as long as children have good outdoor clothing, are out of any biting wind and that their hands are warm, they are happy to play outdoors regardless of the weather.

We have a fire available at snack time on cold days and will often have a hot drink. We are also fortunate to have skilled educators who are quickly able to put up cosy shelters, especially for the wettest and coldest conditions. If nurseries and primary schools in Scandinavia can spend the majority of their time playing in the woods in their challenging climate, we can certainly manage it in School Outdoors Dulwich! 

Our aim is to be outdoors in rain, wind, or shine but in severe storms, where safety could be compromised, we will return to our emergency evacuation venue at the Velodrome. If the weather is assessed as being dangerous our Forest School qualified practitioners will make a decision and return back to our site at the Velodrome. 

If the weather is very hot we make sure that children are out of the sun in the hottest parts of the day and are in the shade. Before playing outside we will ensure that children have adequate sun protection such as a hat, sun cream and long sleeved light-weight clothing provided by the parents. 

We have a specified area in the woods where we have a children’s toilet within a toilet tent to offer shelter and privacy for toileting. Children not used to toileting outside quickly adapt and staff are on hand to assist as needed. We provide warm water and soap for hand washing in warmer months and anti-bacterial wipes or warm water and soap for after toileting in colder weather. 

Inside our tent we have a table and chairs where children sit down to eat their breakfast, snacks, lunch and tea. The children wash their hands and clean the table themselves before they eat. Depending on the weather we will at times eat our snack in the of circle outside or cook food over a campfire. 

Yes! For those children who are still sleeping during the day, we provide cosy camping beds and blankets for sleep time in our main tent. All that fresh air usually encourages great sleeps!

Your child being in an outdoor setting doesn’t mean they won’t be covering all areas of the curriculum. Opportunities to learn Maths occur all the time when outside, such as collecting and counting stones or pine cones around the site, roleplaying a shop selling stick ice creams or comparing the length and weight of different logs. Using tools is a perfect way to incorporate Maths, such as measuring the piece of wood with a tape measure and discussing the different shapes when creating something out of wood. 

The forest is a magical setting and a brilliant inspiration for storytelling and writing! We often have a storytelling session at the end of the day in our circle time with lots of input from the children. Writing follows on naturally from this and we often make our own little books out of paper and twigs to write down are stories and there is always paper and mark making materials available for the children to experiment with. We often have a reading area with a large selection of books for the children to choose and read.