Record keeping
The shoebox of paper. The laminated forms that never quite match the day. The accident book in the boot, the consent slips in a folder at home. The Forest School app gathers all of it into one source of truth (registers, risk-benefit assessments, accidents, consents and learning journeys) and turns each session into a tidy, inspection-ready PDF.
The children who booked the session arrive already on the register: tap to mark present, note an early collection, log who's late. Attendance and your adult-to-child ratio are recorded as you go, not reconstructed from memory afterwards.
Keep a library of reusable risk-benefit assessments (tool use, fire, water, the woodland itself) and stack the ones you need onto each session. They're snapshotted to that day, so the record shows exactly the risks you assessed, with your dynamic on-site notes alongside.
No more accident book in the boot. Record a bump, a near-miss or an incident there and then, with the time, what happened and what you did. It lives on the session record, so nothing slips through and you can show a clear, dated history whenever you're asked.
The information you most need in the woods is the information hardest to lay your hands on when it's stuffed in a folder at home. In the Forest School app, parents keep allergies, medical notes, emergency contacts and consents up to date through their own portal, so what you carry into the session is current, not last term's photocopy.
Consent is built into the day rather than bolted on. A child without photo consent simply can't be photographed: the app won't let it happen, and it re-checks server-side so the rule holds however you're using it. Allergies and medication needs surface right where you're marking the register, so the adult on the ground sees them at the moment they matter. It's the difference between a consent slip you hope is still valid and a live record you can trust.
The proof point
When an inspector or an FSA assessor asks "show me a session", you don't go hunting through three folders and a phone. Every session exports as one clean PDF that gathers the lot: the register and who attended, your adult-to-child ratio, the weather decision you made and why, the risk-benefit assessments you stacked, any incidents or accidents, medication given, tools and fire use, and your end-of-day reflection.
It's the same record you kept as you ran the day, not a tidy-up written afterwards to look good. That's what an Ofsted or FSA inspection wants to see: real, contemporaneous practice. One tap, one PDF, ready to print or email. The proof was being made all along; the app just hands it over.
Session record · 12 June
Good forest school isn't a one-off worksheet. It's a cycle, and the app follows it. You plan a session and its risk-benefit assessments; you observe what children actually do, capturing observations and photos against each child as the day unfolds; you adapt on the ground, logging dynamic risk decisions and changes of plan as the weather or the group shifts; and afterwards you review with a reflection that feeds straight into planning the next one.
Because each step is captured where it happens, the learning journey builds itself. Over a term you can see a child's progress as a thread of observations, not a blank book you dread filling in on a Sunday night, and it maps cleanly onto the EYFS areas of learning when you need it to.
You're holding children's data, so it has to be handled properly, and it is. The Forest School app is built to UK GDPR from the ground up. Children's records stay inside your setting: they aren't shared across other providers, they're never sold, and they're never mined to train anything. Your records are yours.
Safeguarding is treated with the seriousness it deserves. Concerns are locked to your Designated Safeguarding Lead: not visible to general staff, not to other admins, and never to us as the people who run the platform. Everything is UK-hosted and tenant-isolated, so one setting can't see another's data. You can read exactly how we handle it in our privacy policy.
Record-keeping questions
The session PDF brings together everything an inspector or FSA assessor typically asks to see (register, ratios, weather decision, risk-benefit assessments, incidents, medication, tools and fire, and your reflection) in one dated document per session. It's contemporaneous, because you built it while running the day, which is exactly what inspection-ready means. See our Ofsted guide for what's expected.
Only your Designated Safeguarding Lead. Safeguarding concerns are deliberately kept apart from ordinary records: general staff and other admins can't see them, and neither can we as the platform operator. That separation is enforced in the software, not just in policy.
It's UK-hosted under UK GDPR, kept inside your setting, and it stays yours. We don't sell it, we don't mine it, and we don't share it with other settings. Full detail is in our privacy policy.
Set your setting up free for 14 days, no card needed. Run a session, tap once, and you've a PDF ready for anyone who asks.