Founder & Developer
Made for UK forest schools
The record book that works where you do.
My latest build. The Forest School App runs a forest school session end to end - planning, bookings, registers, risk-benefit, observations and reports - all on your phone, in the woods, with no signal. Everything saves to your device the moment you tap, and uploads itself when you are back in range.
Bluebell Wood · Thursday group
Kept the stream play, added 1:1 supervision.
made the call on the day
Booking Tools Weren't Built For The Woods
You didn't train as a forest school leader to wrestle a paper register in the rain, or lose an observation to a soggy notebook. The booking apps badge themselves "forest school" but stop at payments and registers. The nursery systems own the indoor EYFS write-ups.
Nobody covers the bit that actually happens under the trees - the risk-benefit call, the dynamic site check, the tools and the fire, the learning in the mud. That's the whole of the Forest School App.
It does the bookings and the payments too, because you shouldn't need two subscriptions to run one session. But those were the easy half. Parents book from a link, the waitlist manages itself, and the register is already populated before you get to the gate - and then the app carries on into the woods with you, which is where the others stop.
I've spent nearly two decades building software, and the hardest constraint here isn't a fancy feature - it's the woods themselves. No signal. Cold hands. A leader who has eight children, two adults, a campfire and a stream to think about, and roughly five seconds to record a decision before they're back to watching the group. Every design choice in the app bends around that reality.
Everything the trees need recording
Made For The Forest-School Layer The Others Ignore
Works Offline, Syncs Itself
Every register, risk note, observation and incident saves to the phone the instant you tap. Walk back into signal and it uploads on its own - no more "did that actually save?".
Dynamic Risk-Benefit In Seconds
Tap the hazard, tap what you did about it, keep the benefit. A five-second log that proves you made the call on the day - the thing inspectors actually look for.
Tools & Fire, All Accounted For
Knives issued and returned, fire lit and gone cold. The app flags anything left unreconciled before you leave site, so nothing sharp goes home in a rucksack.
Photos That Respect Consent
A child without photo consent simply can't be photographed - the camera won't open. The rule is built in and checked on both ends, not a box you might forget on a busy morning.
Learning That Grows With The Child
Quick voice or text observations tagged against the FSA's NETA framework - physical, social, emotional, cognitive, language - so a term's worth of muddy moments adds up to distance travelled, per child.
Inspection-Ready In One Tap
Every session becomes a tidy PDF: register, ratios, weather decision, risks, incidents and reflections. Ready for the FSA, Ofsted, or a worried parent.
Bookings That Fill Their Own Register
Parents book from a shared link with just an email - no app to download, no password to forget. Confirmed bookings become the register, the rest go on a waitlist on their own, and consents live in the same place as the child.
Safeguarding With Walls In It
On a team plan every staff member records under their own name, and safeguarding concerns sit behind a DSL wall that the rest of the team simply cannot see. Staff compliance - DBS, first aid, quals - is tracked in the same breath.
The Clearing
A free activity library, open to anyone, account or not. Every idea comes with steps, a kit list and a risk-benefit assessment you can plan straight into a session instead of writing it out again at 10pm.
Built Around The Six Principles
Forest school already has a definition, and it isn't a marketing one. Rather than invent a structure, I built the app around the six principles practitioners are trained and assessed against - so the thing you have to evidence is the thing the software records.
1. A Long-Term Process
Plan, observe, adapt, review - as an actual cycle you can see across a term, not a folder of one-off session sheets.
2. Woodland Care
Site records, surveys and a daily check with a name against it. The wood is a participant, and it gets looked after like one.
3. Supported Risk
Risk-benefit, not risk-avoidance. The app makes you name the benefit before the hazard, because that's the order the principle puts them in.
4. Holistic Development
Whole-child observations against NETA, adding up to distance travelled rather than a tick against a milestone.
5. Qualified Practitioners
DBS, qualifications and CPD held on a free account that belongs to the practitioner and travels with them to every setting they work for.
6. Learner-Centred
Observations reach families while the mud is still fresh, instead of surfacing in a report six weeks after the child had the moment.
Simple, Honest Pricing
Practitioners and volunteers are always free. 30-day free trial for leaders and settings - no card required. Never priced per child.
Practitioners
A free account to manage your own profile and compliance - DBS, first aid, qualifications - shared to every setting you work for. It's yours, and it follows you.
Solo
For the sole-trader leader. Unlimited children, sessions and woods, unlimited free volunteers, the offline field app, and parent bookings and payments. Flat rate - not per site.
Team
Everything in Solo, plus every staff member recording under their own name, roles and permissions, the DSL safeguarding wall, staff compliance tracking and commissioning-body access. Still a flat rate.
If you collect parent payments through the app there's a flat 1% on top of the card fees. If you'd rather take money the way you always have, you can - the bookings still work. Trusts and chains running several organisations, get in touch and we'll sort something out.
Under the Hood
The technical side of building software for a place with no signal.
Offline-First, Always
The field app treats the device as the source of truth. Records write locally the instant you tap; the network is an optimisation, not a dependency. You can leave your phone in aeroplane mode all session and lose nothing.
Sync & Conflict Handling
When signal returns, a background sync reconciles what changed on the device with the server. Timestamps and ownership rules decide who wins, so a flaky 4G bar never costs a record.
Consent As Code
Photo consent isn't a warning label - it's enforced. The capture flow checks consent before the camera will open, so safeguarding is a property of the system, not a habit.
.NET, Azure, Two Front Doors
The same stack I trust everywhere - .NET on the backend, hosted on Azure. On top of it, two very different clients: the app on phone, tablet and Windows for the woods, and a browser back-office for the planning and reporting you'd rather do sat down.
PDF On Demand
A whole session - register, ratios, weather decision, risks, incidents, reflections - rendered into a single clean PDF that an inspector or a parent can actually read.
Your Data Stays Yours
Practitioner profiles, children's records, observations - it's sensitive data about children, and it's treated that way. No selling it, no mining it, clear ownership throughout.
See The Forest School App
30 days free. No card. Cancel anytime, and your records stay yours.
Visit forestschool.app