Can forest schools be used as a medium to promote a pro-environmental attitude?

This is a study investigating if Forest Schools, which is a holistic approach to learning, focusing on learning outdoors in a natural place such as a wood (Blackwell, 2011) can be used as a medium to promote a pro-environmental attitude in children who have taken part in it, compared to children who have not taken part in it. This was carried out with the use of a questionnaire (Musser and Malthus, 1994) to measure children’s attitude towards the environment, on a scale of one to a hundred. They were given out to children between eight and eleven years old, in three schools that had taken part in Forest Schools and three schools that had not taken part in Forest Schools in a mixture of rural and urban areas. A t-test was used to analyse the results and this showed there to be a significant difference between the two groups, with those that had taken part in Forest Schools displaying a more pro-environmental attitude. Secondary analyses was conducted on median income for the boroughs where the schools were located and the environmental attitude score to see if there was a relationship between, a test of regression was used and it showed there to be no relationship. This study highlights the potential of Forest Schools in developing pro-environmental attitudes and how this may in turn develop empathy with the natural world, growing a generation that can take responsibility for the environmental issues that we are going to be faced with