Thinking long term with nature connection

Natasha Sharma 

Wilder Learning Officer

This summer our future Forest School Leaders group from the Lost Woods project area of the Low Weald found themselves to be a part of a network of learners that extended beyond their own settings, almost like its own wood-wide web.

Within a part of Chailey Common, the group arrived to find a pools of water within a lowland heath woodland where they would be learning.

They were in fact standing in the footsteps of a group who had been there before them, one of that group’s teachers was with us and could explain: these leaky dams were constructed by the local school children on another Sussex Wildlife Trust project to help water quality and earth resilience in the face of the impacts of climate change.

The future Forest School Leaders were amazed to see how effective the children’s impact had been – the effect already being so clear after one very wet spring this year. Enabling young people to connect with nature in a meaningful way (through provoking curiosity in the environment and the current climate emergency) has obviously had a lasting effect.

By the end of the first training week the future Forest School Leaders were inspired to facilitate their own Forest School session and were able to include incidental leaky dam improvement, led by their specific client group themselves… who were very much looking forward to coming back and, incidentally, keeping up the good work.

Many thanks to the Lost Woods Partnership, Forest Schools Association, East Sussex County Council Rangers, the Wilder Ouse Leaky Dams project and of course our own Wilder Learning team