The Foresters’ Forest was a Heritage Lottery Funded Landscape Partnership programme formed from an association of partner organisations and local community groups within the Forest of Dean.
As a school we are immensely proud to have worked with the Foresters’ Forest Programme to not only re-design our own history curriculum but inspire other schools in the area so that as many children as possible are enthused and inspired to learn from and explore their unique forest environment. We aim to build a legacy of proud, active, interested Foresters who will work to protect and promote their heritage.
Extracts from the Foresters' Forest Working with Schools Website (click to enlarge).
The ‘Working with Schools’ Foresters’ Forest project aimed to enthuse local teachers and children about their natural, built and cultural heritage; helping them develop pride in their Forest heritage along with the desire to protect and promote it in future.
In the film link below, we explain how, as a school, we fully immersed ourselves in the Foresters’ Forest programme by re-writing our school curriculum to learn about our local heritage.
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Working With Schools: Our Forest Future |
Foresters' Forest Working with Schools
Evaluation Report
"The experience of Lydbrook demonstrates that where a school makes a commitment to a programme like Foresters’ Forest, it stands to gain huge rewards.
What Lydbrook did above all was take a whole school approach to engaging with its local heritage. Senior staff had specific roles and all staff were soon involved in a creative process of curriculum development. Community links were forged, initially through parental involvement, and it now seems hard to envisage how Lydbrook School could not be immersed in its local heritage.
The teaching staff have been responsible for developing a highly engaging pedagogy and the school has capitalised on the wider range of Foresters’ Forest activities. These have included opportunities to visit senior citizens in local care homes, presentations to other schools by pupils and teachers, featuring on local radio and the television programme ‘Country File’ plus a royal visit in which a Forest dialect poem was recited for Princess Anne. This is a whole school approach that understands ‘school’ as inseparable from the social and physical environment in which it is located."
To read the full evaluation report which was produced by Dr Paul Vare from the University of Gloucestershire, please click on the link below.
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2021-10-26 Foresters Forest Schools' Project Evaluation Report 2021 - Final | [pdf 1MB] |
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