Growing Agency in the Woods

I’ve developed a thing. Could Scotland use it?

I’ve been developing a Forest School progression model that tries to make Curriculum for Excellence visible without turning outdoor learning into a checklist. Using organisers, schema threads and developmental descriptors, it aims to give adults a language for progression while leaving children’s experience open. I think it might have wider potential across Scotland — but first I’d like people to challenge it, test it and help me make it better.

I’ve been working on something.

I think it might be useful. Possibly very useful.

But I’m also conscious that the moment you become convinced you’ve invented something ace is probably the moment to find some clever people who can tell you what you’ve missed.

So this is partly a story about something I’ve developed, and partly an invitation: could this become something useful for Scottish education? And, if so, who might help me find out?

The problem

I’ve been working with Tighnabruaich Primary School to develop a long-term Forest School programme in which children return to the same woodland, week after week and year after year.

My intention matters. I want children to play. To build things. To get cold occasionally, notice that they are cold; and work out what to do about it.

To climb, negotiate, make, imagine, light fires, use tools, tell stories, notice the first buds opening, disagree about how a shelter should be built and somehow find a way of building it together.

In other words, to encounter a little more of the real world.

The difficulty is not convincing teachers that learning is happening. They can see it.

The difficulty is that teachers are also working within Curriculum for Excellence, with scrutiny from HM Inspectorate and sometimes parents who see little or no value in their kids being outside. Teachers need to understand progression, gather appropriate evidence and make professional judgements. Sometimes the teacher responsible for that judgement is not even in the woods when the learning happened.

There is an understandable temptation to solve this by curricularising the Forest School session: ‘today we are going outside to meet this outcome’. And, very quickly, something rather precious can disappear.

So I began wondering whether we could reverse the process.

A curriculum hiding in plain sight

Curriculum for Excellence gives us useful ingredients. Experiences and Outcomes express broad developmental intent. Benchmarks help teachers interpret standards and support professional judgement.

The challenge is seeing how those pieces come together when a child is doing something gloriously interdisciplinary in a wood. Take shelter building. A child might be estimating length, investigating materials, solving structural problems, negotiating with other children, managing risk, communicating ideas, adapting to weather and coping with the frustration of their roof repeatedly falling down.

And perhaps the most useful question is not simply which curriculum statements can be attached to the activity, but: what is gradually forming in this child?

From organisers to schema threads

I have organised Forest School learning through five broad interdisciplinary lenses: Practical Survival & Outdoor Skills; Nature Awareness & Environmental Inquiry; Health, Wellbeing & Personal Development; Creativity & Expressive Exploration; and Problem Solving, Numeracy & Thinking Skills.

These are not new curricular areas, and I am not suggesting that they replace Curriculum for Excellence. They are practitioner-designed organisers: a way of seeing real-world outdoor learning without forcing it back into separate subject boxes.

Within each organiser sit what I am calling schema threads. These bring together related experiences, skills, behaviours and curriculum expectations into developmental pathways.

A thread might move from recognising to selecting to adapting; from exploring to constructing to evaluating; or from noticing to recognising patterns to understanding relationships.

The intention is not to create a new checklist. It is almost the opposite: to help adults notice the pattern forming across many different experiences.

Emergent learner schemas

Over time, connected experiences can begin to form something larger. I have been calling these emergent learner schemas: integrated patterns of competence, judgement, agency and relationship.

For example: A child does not merely learn to put on waterproofs. Through repeated encounters with weather, discomfort, clothing, shelter, movement and decision-making, they can gradually become someone able to manage themselves within an environment.

A child does not simply learn a knot. Knots, materials, structures, measurement, failure, redesign and collaboration can contribute towards practical design reasoning.

And noticing a beetle, recognising a species, watching seasonal change and returning to the same tree year after year can deepen into ecological understanding and relationship with place.

The schemas are not taken directly from Curriculum for Excellence. They are an interpretive layer: a way of describing what may emerge when related Experiences and Outcomes, Benchmarks and lived experiences accumulate over time.

Developmental descriptors — making progression visible

Alongside the schema threads, I have developed developmental descriptors across Early, First and Second Level. These are not additional Curriculum for Excellence Benchmarks, and they are not intended as another checklist.

They describe what a developing competence might look like at different stages: how supported exploration can become increasing independence; how noticing can deepen into interpretation; how trial and error can become planning, adaptation and evaluation.

This feels important because it gives practitioners something that can otherwise be difficult to articulate in Forest School: a language for progression without prescribing the experience that produces it.

A child does not have to complete a particular activity to “reach” a descriptor. The descriptor helps the adult recognise development wherever it appears — in play, conversation, problem-solving, tool use, relationships, journals or repeated encounters with the same place.

For mixed-stage classes in particular, this potentially gives teachers and practitioners a shared developmental lens across Early, First and Second Level while still allowing children to follow very different paths through the woodland.

The developmental descriptors describe the learner, not prescribe the lesson.

This may be the most practically useful part. You see, Curriculum for Excellence already provides Experiences and Outcomes and Benchmarks; Forest School already provides a rich pedagogy for experiential learning. What I am trying to build between them is a developmental translation layer — organisers, schema threads and developmental descriptors that help us see how lived outdoor experience can grow into increasingly complex competence, agency and judgement.

The curriculum remains visible throughout, but the destination is not a completed spreadsheet. The destination is a more capable and resilient little human.

Self, others and environment

None of this begins with me. There is a long and rich tradition of thinking about what happens to people through meaningful experience outdoors.

Colin Mortlock’s writing on outdoor education has been particularly important to my thinking, especially the idea that outdoor experience can deepen our relationship with self, others and environment. That feels closely connected to what I am trying to notice here.

The competence I am interested in is not simply the ability to light a fire or build a shelter. It is the gradual development of agency and self-determination alongside awareness, responsibility and care.

Can I recognise what my body needs? Can I make a decision? Can I judge risk? Can I contribute to a group? Can I care for another person? Can I notice what my actions are doing to this place? Can I change my behaviour because of what I notice?

These seem to me fairly useful things for a human being to learn.

Where place becomes part of us

There is another dimension I do not want an assessment framework to lose: memory.

The children are not visiting an interchangeable patch of woodland to complete outdoor activities. They are returning.

The fallen tree is not simply a fallen tree. It is where we built the shelter that leaked. Where someone first used the bow saw. Where we found the frog. Where the fire was when it snowed.

Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory explores the way landscape becomes entangled with story, culture and memory. Something related seems to happen developmentally when children repeatedly inhabit a place.

Knowledge is no longer floating independently in the child’s head. It becomes attached to weather, people, mistakes, smells, stories, competence and place.

The woodland becomes both landscape and memory.

The framework is really for the adults

Having built all this architecture around children’s learning, I realised that its most important effect might actually be on the adults.

If a teacher can look at a child’s Forest School journal, hear their account, see an observation from the practitioner and locate that evidence within a developmental schema thread — with relevant Curriculum for Excellence expectations sitting behind it — the teacher has something professionally useful.

They can see progression. They can discuss it with colleagues. They can make a professional judgement. They can evidence learning without needing to interrupt the experience in order to manufacture evidence.

Could Scotland use this?

At the moment, this is a developing model. I have designed it through my work as a Forest School practitioner and outdoor learning specialist, and it is being contextualised through collaboration with a Scottish primary school.

I do not want to make grand claims for it before it has been properly challenged and tested.

I am very open to discovering that parts of it need changing, that there are gaps in my thinking, or that somebody somewhere has already solved parts of this problem better than I have.

But I do think there is something here worth exploring.

What I think may be distinctive is not any one element in isolation, but the way the model combines CfE alignment, interdisciplinary Forest School organisers, developmental descriptors and emergent learner schemas into one progression architecture — while deliberately leaving the child’s experience open.

A shared progression architecture of this kind could potentially help schools make greater use of sustained outdoor and place-based learning while giving teachers confidence that progression remains visible within Curriculum for Excellence.

Crucially, it would not require every school to run the same bloody Forest School programme.

A city park, community woodland, beach, croft, school grounds or Highland glen could offer very different experiences while contributing towards common developmental patterns of competence.

Could this be tested across a small group of schools? Could teachers and children help refine it? Could researchers help examine whether the developmental pathways hold up? Could local authorities, Education Scotland or the Scottish Government eventually help make something like this available more widely if the evidence supports it?

Please help me find out, i live quite far from the corridors of education; where big decisions get made.

A note of thanks

I want to credit author and educationalist Michael King, whose conversations, questions and encouragement have helped shape and challenge my thinking as this work has developed. The framework itself is my attempt to draw threads together, but ideas like this rarely emerge in isolation, and I’m grateful for the consistent dialogue spanning over 33 years since his original synthesis known as the Progressive Learning Matrix.

Keeping the work alive

There is one further tension I want to name rather than hide. I’m a crofter and an educator. I need to earn a living and sustain my family, and I would like work of this kind to contribute to that. I don’t particularly anticipate turning myself into a consultant. I do, however, want to be able to keep developing and sharing useful work without keeping the wolf at the door. I don’t think public value and making a living need to be in conflict.

I want to share enough of the thinking for people to understand it, challenge it and help improve it, while being thoughtful about the parts that may need to remain commercially sensitive as the model develops. I don’t want to lock something useful away. Equally, I don’t think the price of contributing an idea to education should be giving away every part of the work before there is a sustainable way to carry it forward.

Perhaps licensing could be part of that middle ground if the model proves useful: a straightforward way for schools, local authorities or other partners to use it fairly and widely, while allowing the work itself to remain viable. There may be other, better models. I’d genuinely welcome advice from people who understand this territory. The aim isn’t to build a consultancy around it; it is to find a way for the idea to travel while the work, and the family behind it, can also be sustained.

Can anyone help?

I would particularly like to hear from people working in Curriculum for Excellence, Education Scotland, local authorities, teacher education, assessment and moderation, Learning for Sustainability, outdoor learning, Forest School, developmental psychology or curriculum research — and from anyone with experience of licensing or sustaining educational resources intended for public benefit.

I am looking for challenge as much as endorsement: people who can tell me where the model is weak, point me towards work I have missed, help test whether the developmental clusters are defensible, and explore what proper piloting and validation might look like.

If, after all of that, there really is something here, I would love to work with others on how it might travel.

Because underneath the matrices, curriculum language and schema threads, the ambition is quite simple: I would like children in Scotland to have more opportunities to develop agency, competence and a caring relationship with themselves, each other and the living world.

Permit them to wear soil, the skin of our earth; on their own.

If this connects with your work, please get in touch.