Risk-benefit assessments
Forest school lives or dies on its risk-benefit assessments, and most leaders carry them in a ring binder that never sees the woods. The Forest School app puts your site, activity and daily RBAs on the phone in your pocket, lets you log dynamic risk the moment a hazard changes, and keeps the benefit front and centre, not buried under the hazard.
The sector works in three tiers: the standing site assessment for the woodland itself, the activity assessments for the things you do there (fire, tools, climbing, water), and the daily check you make on arrival. The Forest School app holds all three, so the assessment an inspector expects to see is exactly the one you've got.
Write your fire-circle or whittling RBA properly, once, and keep it in your library. Each time you run a session you stack it on, and the app takes a frozen snapshot, so the copy attached to that day never changes even if you tweak the master later. That snapshot is your inspection record for the session.
The wind picks up, a branch comes down, the stream's higher than yesterday. Tap the hazard, tap the control you put in place, keep the benefit. Done in seconds, with cold hands, with no signal. The log is append-only, so it proves you made the call on the day, not at the desk that evening.
Why it's risk-BENEFIT
Anyone can list what might go wrong with a rope swing or an open fire. The reason the sector insists on risk-benefit assessment is that the hazard is only half the picture: the child who builds resilience climbing that tree, who learns to handle a knife with respect, who finds focus tending a fire: that's the point of the whole thing. The Forest School app makes you name the benefit beside every control, so when a nervous parent or an inspector asks "why is there a fire?", your answer is already written down. Strip the benefit out and you're left with a list of reasons not to do forest school at all. Our how-to guide on risk-benefit assessment walks through getting the balance right, and the fire and tool safety guide shows it applied to the two activities leaders worry about most.
Dynamic risk · Bluebell Wood
Just logged
Kept the stream play; the benefit was worth the control.
When a session closes, every stacked RBA, frozen as it was on the day, travels out inside the session PDF, right alongside the register, ratios, the weather (go / modify / no-go, with your reason), the dynamic risk log, incidents, tools and fire, and your reflection. One tidy document an FSA assessor or Ofsted inspector can read without you hunting through a binder. The same RBAs you build here are the ones you stack when you plan a session, so the assessment and the plan are never out of step.
All of this runs fully offline, because the woods rarely have a bar of signal, and a risk tool you can't open in the woods isn't a risk tool. Build your RBAs at the kitchen table, then log dynamic risk under the trees; it all syncs the moment you're back in range.
Every leader, assistant and volunteer gets a free account. Only the setting (the provider running the sessions) needs a plan, and one plan covers the whole team. A freelance leader is a one-person setting on Solo (£15 a month); a setting with staff is on Team (£29 a site). Try it 14 days free, no card. See full pricing or the full feature list.
RBA questions
No. That's the whole point of stacking. The copy attached to a past session is a frozen snapshot taken when you ran it, so improving your master library never rewrites history. Old sessions stay exactly as you assessed them on the day.
Yes. The dynamic risk log works fully offline: tap the hazard, tap the control, keep the benefit. It's append-only and timestamped, so it stands as evidence you made the call in the moment, and it syncs once you're back in range.
Yes. Every stacked RBA exports inside the session PDF along with the register, ratios, weather decision, incidents, tools and fire, and your reflection: one inspection-ready document per session.
Set your setting up free for 14 days, no card needed. Build your RBAs once and stack them on every session.