Forest School and Nature-Based Early Childhood Education: Rain or Shine in the Research Literature

Forest School is an approach to early education in which children spend regular, repeated sessions in woodland or other natural settings over an extended period, learning chiefly through self-directed play, exploration, and supported risk-taking under the guidance of a trained leader. Rooted in Scandinavian open-air culture and carried to Britain by a 1993 study visit to Denmark, the approach has grown into an international movement with a rapidly maturing research literature. This review traces Forest School's history and examines the evidence behind its claims. Qualitative and mixed-method studies consistently report gains in confidence, social skills, language, and emotional wellbeing; quantitative research links naturalistic outdoor time to motor fitness, physical activity, attention, and working memory; and the risky-play literature supports the approach's distinctive embrace of manageable challenge. Direct evidence on academic outcomes remains thin and methodologically limited, resting largely on small samples and few controlled designs. The review closes with practical implications for families weighing nature-based provision and notes where stronger research is needed.

Unlike most named pedagogies, Forest School has no single founder and no founding text. It grew out of a way of life. In Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, friluftsliv — roughly, "open-air life" — is a broadly shared cultural inheritance, and the professional body for Forest School in the United Kingdom traces the approach's roots directly to this Scandinavian outdoor culture as it permeated early-years provision (Forest School Association, n.d.). From the 1950s onward, forest and nature kindergartens (skovbørnehaver, naturbørnehaver) multiplied across Denmark, helped along by practical shortages of indoor childcare space as much as by philosophy. The movement's oft-repeated founding story credits Ella Flatau, a Danish mother whose daily walks in the woods with her own and neighbors' children in the early 1950s are said to have grown into an organized "walking kindergarten." The story is widely retold in the Forest School literature, but the dates given vary and primary documentation is thin, so it is best treated as a founding narrative rather than a precisely dated event. What is well documented is the institutional result: nature-based kindergartens became, and remain, a normalized mainstream option across Scandinavia, sustained by Denmark's distinctive tradition of the trained pedagogue and a social consensus that young children belong outdoors in nearly all weather (Williams-Siegfredsen, 2017; Dean, 2019).

Sweden contributed a parallel strand. In 1957, Gösta Frohm of the national outdoor association Friluftsfrämjandet created Skogsmulle, a friendly forest character around whom structured nature sessions for young children were built — stories, songs, and sensory exploration in the woods, animated by Frohm's worry that modern living was distancing children from nature (Friluftsfrämjandet, n.d.). In 1985 the idea was extended into full-time preschool provision with the first I Ur och Skur ("Rain or Shine") nursery, and a parallel Waldkindergarten movement took root in Germany. Denmark also developed a school-age sibling, udeskole ("outdoor school"): regular curriculum-based teaching days spent outside the classroom, led by the class teacher. A nationwide Danish survey found that roughly 14 percent of schools practiced weekly or biweekly udeskole with at least some classes, despite the practice having no mandate in the national curriculum — a measure of how deeply outdoor learning is woven into ordinary Scandinavian schooling, though the same survey of practicing teachers also revealed gaps between the movement's advocated pedagogy and what classrooms actually do outdoors (Bentsen & Jensen, 2012).

The decisive step for the English-speaking world came in 1993, when a group of nursery nurses from Bridgwater College in Somerset, England, visited Denmark to study its preschool system. Struck by the outdoor, child-centered, play-based practice they observed, they returned home, established woodland sessions for the college crèche, and coined an English name for what they had seen: "Forest School" — a term no Danish setting actually uses. The college developed a Forest School qualification in 1995, training spread through local authorities during the 2000s, a national conference formulated a shared UK definition in 2002, and on July 7, 2012, the Forest School Association was launched at Elvaston Castle, Derbyshire, as the professional body and standard-setter (Forest School Association, n.d.). From Britain the model traveled onward — to bush kinder programs in Australia, forest preschools across North America, and adaptations in Asia — with each country refracting the Scandinavian original through its own educational culture (Dean, 2019).

What exactly is Forest School?

In UK usage, Forest School does not mean occasional nature walks. The practitioner literature defines it by a cluster of commitments: sessions take place in a woodland or other natural setting; they are regular and repeated over an extended period — ideally across seasons — rather than one-off visits; learning is predominantly child-led, arising from play, exploration, and self-chosen challenge; risk is managed rather than eliminated, with tool use, climbing, and campfires treated as curriculum rather than hazard; and sessions are run by a leader holding a recognized Forest School qualification (Knight, 2013). Comparative research sharpens the picture. Waite, Bølling, and Bentsen (2016), setting English Forest Schools alongside Danish udeskole within a common conceptual framework, found the two share an outdoor setting, a holistic view of development, and confidence in the benefits of learning outside — but differ tellingly in their institutional position. Udeskole is woven into ordinary school teaching by ordinary teachers; English Forest School typically operates as a distinct, sometimes externally purchased service alongside the regular curriculum, reflecting the more centralized, assessment-driven schooling culture into which it was transplanted.

That transplantation has drawn scholarly criticism worth taking seriously. Leather (2018) argues that something was "lost in translation" when a taken-for-granted Scandinavian way of being outdoors was repackaged in Britain as a branded, certificated product: Forest School, he contends, is a social construction whose theoretical account of play is underdeveloped, and whose commodification — qualifications, trademark-like identity, paid provision — sits uneasily with the everyday outdoor culture it emulates. Geographic research adds a subtler observation: in a study involving observation of 72 primary-school children and interviews with 20 experienced leaders, Harris (2018) found that much of what makes Forest School feel different is spatial — the woodland functions as a space apart from the classroom, where different behaviors are permitted, adult–child relationships loosen, and activity is not pre-mapped to curricular targets. The definitional looseness that critics identify is real, and it complicates research: studies of "Forest School" are not always studying the same thing.

Confidence, wellbeing, and social growth: the core evidence base

The largest body of Forest School research is qualitative and observational, and its findings are strikingly consistent. The earliest substantial evaluation, conducted for the UK's Forest Research agency, followed young children at case-study sites in Britain, with observations spanning eight months, and organized its findings into six themes: increased confidence and self-esteem; improved social skills and cooperative ability; gains in language and communication; improved motivation and concentration; better physical motor skills; and deeper knowledge and understanding of the natural environment (O'Brien & Murray, 2007). The authors were candid that these were practitioner-observed changes in small groups rather than measured effects against controls, but the study set the template for a decade of work that has repeatedly recovered the same themes.

Later research put children's own voices at the center. Coates and Pimlott-Wilson (2019), interviewing primary-school children about their Forest School experiences and analyzing the transcripts phenomenologically, identified three interrelated themes: Forest School as a welcome break from classroom routine; learning experienced through play, often without children labeling it as learning; and collaboration and teamwork of a kind the classroom rarely demanded. The authors argue that blending Forest School with formal schooling cultivates competencies — negotiation, mutual help, self-direction — that a classroom-only education under-exercises.

Quantitative support for the wellbeing claims comes from an unusual quasi-experimental comparison. Roe and Aspinall (2011) tracked two aspects of restoration — mood, measured as energy, stress, anger, and hedonic tone, and reflection on personal goals — in young people from schools in deprived urban areas of central Scotland across a conventional school day and a forest school day. Both settings produced positive change, but the forest day produced greater gains on both dimensions, and, notably, the students identified as having poor behavior at school benefited most. The finding echoes a broader pattern in the restorative-environments literature: natural settings appear to help most the children who are struggling most.

Synthesizing two decades of such work, Dabaja (2022) systematically reviewed studies published between 2000 and 2019 and distilled seven recurring categories of reported impact: social and cooperative skills; physical skills; learning performance and cognitive skills; self-confidence and self-esteem; emotional and mental wellbeing; risk-management skills; and environmental awareness and sense of belonging. The convergence across studies, sites, and methods is genuinely impressive. So is the review's caution: most of the underlying studies are small, short, and uncontrolled — a point taken up below.

Moving bodies: motor development and physical activity

If the wellbeing literature is largely qualitative, the physical literature is not. In a landmark Norwegian study, Fjørtoft (2001) compared kindergarten children aged five to seven who played daily in a forest "playscape" with peers using a conventional playground. Over the school year, the forest group showed greater improvement in motor fitness, with the clearest gains in balance and coordination — a result the author attributed to the affordances of varied natural terrain, which invites more diverse, more demanding movement than manufactured equipment. The finding has become a cornerstone of the argument that rough ground is a developmental resource, not an obstacle.

Danish research on outdoor school days points the same direction for older children. Mygind (2007) fitted accelerometers to a class of nine- and ten-year-olds whose teachers taught in a forest one day each week over three years, and found that physical activity on forest days was roughly double that of ordinary classroom days — a difference that held in both winter and summer measurements, and that put an ordinary forest day on par with a school day containing two physical education lessons. For early-childhood programs, the implication is straightforward: time in varied natural settings delivers substantial physical activity without requiring any activity instruction at all. A systematic review of children's engagement with nature more broadly, covering 61 studies, likewise found benefits spanning physical activity, mental health, emotional regulation, and environmental attitudes, with playful engagement styles yielding the widest benefits; its author describes time in nature as part of a "balanced diet" of childhood experience (Gill, 2014).

Nature, attention, and academic learning

Skeptical parents reasonably ask whether woodland afternoons come at academic cost. Two strands of evidence bear on the question: research on nature exposure and cognition generally, and the smaller literature on nature-based programs' academic outcomes specifically.

The first strand has strengthened markedly. Kuo, Barnes, and Jordan (2019), reviewing hundreds of studies in Frontiers in Psychology, concluded that the evidence for a cause-and-effect relationship between nature experiences and learning has become "converging" — no longer resting on correlations alone but on experimental and quasi-experimental work identifying plausible mechanisms: restored attention, reduced stress, greater physical activity and fitness, improved self-discipline, higher motivation and engagement, and calmer, more cooperative learning contexts. Longitudinal evidence from Norway is particularly relevant to preschool. Ulset, Vitaro, Brendgen, Bekkhus, and Borge (2017) followed 562 Norwegian preschoolers for four years and found a dose-response pattern: more hours spent outdoors in preschool predicted better working memory and fewer inattention-hyperactivity symptoms, with the relationships holding across informants. Observational designs cannot fully exclude confounding, but a dose-response gradient in a large sample is considerably stronger evidence than the field possessed a decade ago. A systematic review of nature-specific outdoor learning in school settings, screening research published from 2000 to 2020 across nine databases, likewise found support for socio-emotional, wellbeing, and academic benefits — while emphasizing that outcomes are strongest when outdoor sessions are intentionally designed and connected to curricular purposes rather than treated as recess by another name (Mann et al., 2022).

The second strand is more modest, and honesty requires saying so. The best comparative study of preschool outcomes found equivalence rather than advantage: Cordiano and colleagues (2019), comparing a nature-based and a traditional pre-primary program operating side by side at the same school, found that children in both made the expected year's gains and ended the year equally ready for kindergarten across academic, social-emotional, and behavioral domains. For families, this cuts two ways — no measured academic edge, but also no academic penalty for a year spent substantially outdoors. The most encouraging academic signal comes from a disadvantaged population: McCree, Cutting, and Sherwin (2018) followed eleven children, aged five to seven at entry and facing social, behavioral, or economic disadvantage, through three years of weekly Forest School sessions, and found improved school attendance and academic attainment relative to non-participating peers, alongside gains in wellbeing and nature connection. The authors' title — the hare and the tortoise — captures their interpretation: emotional wellbeing built outdoors took the scenic route to attainment. Eleven children is a small sample, and the design was not randomized; but as a proof of concept for Forest School as an intervention for vulnerable learners, it is among the most suggestive studies in the literature.

Risk as a feature, not a flaw

Perhaps no aspect of Forest School provokes more parental hesitation, or enjoys firmer research support, than its embrace of risk: children whittling with knives, climbing trees, tending fires. The Norwegian scholar Ellen Sandseter provided the field its taxonomy. Drawing on qualitative observations of 38 children and interviews with children and staff in two Norwegian preschools, Sandseter (2007) identified six categories of risky play that children spontaneously seek: play with great heights, with high speed, with harmful tools, near dangerous elements, rough-and-tumble play, and play where children can "disappear" or get lost. Her broader program of research argues that such play has an anti-phobic function — graduated exposure through which children calibrate fear to actual competence.

The health evidence supports the instinct. Brussoni and colleagues (2015), in a systematic review of 21 studies of risky outdoor play, found overall positive effects on physical activity and aspects of social health and behavior, and found that environments supporting risky play — natural elements, freedom of choice — promoted more play, social interaction, creativity, and resilience, without evidence of meaningfully increased serious injury. The authors concluded that the generational decline in such play argues for actively protecting children's access to it. Forest School's structured answer — real risk, progressively introduced, under a trained leader's supervision — is arguably its most distinctive contribution to early-years practice, and Dabaja's (2022) review indeed lists improved risk-management skill among the approach's most consistently reported outcomes.

Reading the evidence honestly

A candid appraisal must acknowledge how much of this literature remains methodologically fragile. Most Forest School studies enroll a handful to a few dozen children; control groups are rare; follow-up is short; and evaluations are frequently conducted by practitioners or advocates with an interest in positive findings. Families who choose nature-based provision differ systematically from those who do not, and no study has randomized children to Forest School, so selection effects cannot be excluded from even the best comparative work. The definitional looseness noted earlier compounds the problem: a weekly two-hour session bolted onto a conventional school and a five-day Scandinavian forest kindergarten are both called "forest school" in the literature, yet they are profoundly different exposures (Waite, Bølling, & Bentsen, 2016; Leather, 2018). Reviewers within the field say as much: Dabaja (2022) explicitly cautions that the evidence base needs larger samples and stronger designs, and Gill (2014) graded much of the nature-benefits literature as methodologically limited even while finding its direction consistent.

What, then, can be said with confidence? The strongest claims are the convergent ones: that natural settings reliably elicit more physical activity and more varied movement; that time outdoors is associated, dose-dependently in the best longitudinal data, with better attention and working memory; that supervised risky play benefits children without materially increasing serious harm; and that children, teachers, and parents consistently report gains in confidence, sociality, and wellbeing across dozens of independent qualitative studies. The weakest claims are the specific ones: that Forest School as a branded program causes academic improvement, or outperforms other high-quality provision. The Cordiano finding of equivalence is, in this light, the appropriately modest headline: nature-based early education appears to be a fully adequate developmental environment, with plausible but unproven additional benefits, rather than a demonstrated superior one.

Practical implications

Several implications follow for families and educators. First, dosage and duration matter: the practices with research behind them involve regular, repeated sessions in genuinely natural settings across seasons, not occasional outings, so parents evaluating a program should ask how often children go out, for how long, and in what weather — the Scandinavian norm that there is no bad weather, only bad clothing, is pedagogically substantive, not folklore. Second, leadership matters: the benefits documented in the literature come from settings where trained adults deliberately support child-led exploration and graduated risk, and a qualified leader who can articulate a risk-benefit approach to tools, fire, and climbing is a marker of quality. Third, risk should be understood as curriculum: parents anxious about knives and campfires can take genuine reassurance from the systematic-review evidence that supported risky play builds competence without measurably increasing serious injury. Fourth, outdoor learning is a complement to, not a replacement for, a coherent pedagogy: the academic evidence favors programs that connect outdoor experience to intentional learning purposes, and the equivalence findings suggest families need not choose between kindergarten readiness and an outdoor childhood — a well-run program delivers both. Finally, the approach travels well across pedagogical traditions: its child-led, observation-based practice shares deep affinities with Montessori education's prepared environment and follow-the-child principle, which is why elements of nature-based practice — daily outdoor work, natural materials, real tools, real responsibility — integrate so readily into Montessori and other play-based settings.

Forest School's journey is, in a sense, the reverse of most pedagogies: it began as an unremarkable feature of Scandinavian childhood and only became a named, studied, credentialed "approach" when it crossed the North Sea. The research that followed has not crowned it, and the field's own reviewers are rightly insistent on better designs, larger samples, and longer follow-up. But the direction of the evidence is consistent and, for early childhood, reassuring. Children given sustained time in natural settings move more and more skillfully; attend better by the best longitudinal measures; take on manageable risks and grow more competent for it; and are seen — by researchers, teachers, parents, and themselves — as more confident, more cooperative, and happier. A movement that began, according to its founding story, with a mother walking children into the Danish woods has ended up somewhere close to where developmental science itself has arrived: the conviction that the outdoors is not a break from young children's education but one of its most natural classrooms, rain or shine.

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