I've spent nearly two decades sitting in front of screens. Writing C#, debugging pipelines, staring at MongoDB queries, arguing with CSS. My entire professional identity is built on being indoors, in a chair, looking at a monitor. So naturally, I've signed up to train as a Forest School Leader.
That sounds like a punchline. It is not.
My wife Sarah runs Nature of Learning, a Forest School provider. She and Charlotte are endorsed trainers - meaning they train other people to become Forest School practitioners. Sarah has been running Forest School sessions for years, and I've been absorbing Forest School philosophy through proximity for a long time. Through conversations over dinner, through watching her plan sessions, through hearing about what happened in the woods that day. But there's a difference between overhearing something and actually understanding it, and I've decided it's time to close that gap.
So I'm joining one of their courses. Properly. As a student. Sarah will be there as trainer, Charlotte will probably be the one marking my coursework, and I'll be sitting cross-legged in the woods hoping neither of them notices that I've accidentally structured my reflective journal like a sprint retrospective. It's either a beautiful expression of personal growth or a spectacular recipe for humiliation. I'll let you know which.
What Forest School Actually Is
Before I go any further, I should probably explain what Forest School is, because most people picture children running around in the woods with sticks. Which does happen. But that's like saying software development is typing - technically accurate and completely missing the point.
Forest School is a learner-led, outdoor educational approach. It's rooted in a set of principles about how people - children and adults - learn best when they're given autonomy, when they're in a natural environment, and when there's a qualified practitioner creating the conditions for that learning to happen. It's not just "outdoor play". There's a pedagogy behind it. There are six core principles. There's a proper qualification framework. It's more structured than it looks from the outside, which is sort of the whole point - the structure is there so the experience can feel unstructured.
The practitioner's job isn't to teach. It's to create an environment where learning happens naturally. If that sounds a bit abstract, think of it this way: you don't tell a child to be curious about woodlice. You create conditions where they encounter woodlice and their own curiosity does the rest.
The Code Zone Connection
Here's the thing that most people wouldn't expect: Forest School philosophy has been quietly influencing how I think about The Code Zone for years.
The Code Zone teaches coding to kids aged six to sixteen. We use Scratch, we make it fun, and the whole approach is built around letting children create things they actually want to create rather than following rigid instructions. A child who wants to make a game about their cat will learn more about variables, loops, and conditional logic than a child who's been told to complete exercise 4.3 on page 12.
That's Forest School thinking. I didn't call it that at the time. I probably called it "good pedagogy" or "not being boring" or something equally unsophisticated. But the principle is the same: learner-led, interest-driven, with a practitioner who facilitates rather than dictates. Sarah has been telling me this for years. I've been nodding along and apparently internalising it without realising.
Getting the formal training feels like finally reading the manual for something I've been using intuitively. And if there's one thing a developer should appreciate, it's reading the documentation.
Wednesday's Intro Call
We had the introductory session on Wednesday. Over Zoom, because apparently even Forest School training starts with everyone sitting indoors looking at screens. There's an irony there that I'm choosing not to examine too closely.
I met the others on the course. They all seemed genuinely lovely - warm, enthusiastic, the kind of people who use phrases like "holding space" without any trace of self-consciousness. I am not yet one of those people. I am a person who builds task management software and has opinions about MongoDB indexing strategies. But I'm trying.
The format involved "Rounds" - where you go around the circle and everyone answers a question in turn. If you've never done a Round on a Zoom call with people you've just met, imagine the specific anxiety of knowing your turn is coming, watching it get closer person by person, and trying to formulate something that sounds thoughtful but not rehearsed while simultaneously forgetting everything about yourself.
The intro questions were straightforward enough. Who are you, why are you here. I can do those. I'm Paul, I'm here because my wife is the trainer and I love the outdoors and I want to understand this thing properly. Fine. Manageable. Slightly sweaty palms but fundamentally okay.
Then there was a slightly loaded one: tell us a drink and a snack, and what that might say about you. My answer - copious vanilla tea, chocolate, and crunchy savoury snacks - probably said more about me than I intended. What does that say about me? Probably trying to treat undiagnosed ADHD.
Silence. This Zoom call was not yet ready for my slightly facetious dry humour coping mechanism. Noted. File that one away for session three, maybe, when they've had time to calibrate to me.
Head and Heart
Then came the question that properly floored me: "Tell me something that's in your head, and something that's in your heart."
My head was easy. What's in my head is that I find this sort of thing genuinely difficult. Meeting new people, group sharing, emotional openness with strangers on a video call - these are not my natural habitat. Give me a room full of developers arguing about whether tabs or spaces is the correct indentation and I'm perfectly comfortable. Ask me to share what's in my heart with eleven people I met four minutes ago and I become briefly convinced that I've forgotten how speech works.
The heart part? I struggled. Not because there's nothing there - there's plenty there - but because articulating it out loud, to people, in real time, with my face visible on a webcam, is a skill I simply haven't developed. I've spent twenty years getting better at talking to computers and approximately zero years getting better at talking about feelings.
I said something. I don't remember exactly what. It probably wasn't terrible. But I know it wasn't what I actually wanted to say, because what I actually wanted to say was tangled up somewhere between my chest and my throat and couldn't find the exit.
That's not a metaphor for emotional constipation. Well. Maybe it is a bit.
A Different Kind of Growth
This blog has been about my AI journey - documenting the transition from sceptic to someone who runs six-agent teams and builds MCP servers. That journey has been almost entirely intellectual. Learn the tools, understand the patterns, push the boundaries of what's technically possible. Satisfying in the way that solving a hard problem is satisfying.
Forest School training is going to be a completely different kind of growth. And yes, that pun is intended, but it's also true. This isn't about learning a new framework or mastering a new deployment pipeline. This is about learning to sit with discomfort, to be vulnerable in a group, to slow down, to notice things that don't appear on a screen. To be outside, properly outside, not just passing through on the way to somewhere with WiFi.
I spend my working life telling AI what to do. Clear instructions, specific outputs, measurable results. Forest School is the opposite of that. You don't tell a child what to discover. You don't measure the output of a morning spent building a den. You create the conditions and then you step back, which is a profoundly uncomfortable thing for someone whose instinct is to optimise everything.
The whole point is that not everything needs to be optimised. Some things just need to be experienced. I know that intellectually. Learning to feel it is going to be the hard part.
When the Screens Go Dark
There's another reason I'm doing this, and anyone who knows me has already heard this speech at least twice.
I build software for a living. Everything I know how to do well requires electricity, an internet connection, and the continued existence of cloud infrastructure. If the world goes sideways - and have you looked at the news recently? - my entire skill set becomes about as useful as a chocolate fireguard. I can't eat a MongoDB query. Nobody's going to barter Azure credits for tinned food. My two decades of C# experience will not keep my family warm.
I say this to people regularly and they tend to laugh nervously. But I'm not joking. Well, I'm half joking. The point stands though: every line of code I've ever written depends on power grids, data centres, and the general agreement that society will continue functioning tomorrow roughly the way it did today. That's a lot of assumptions for a man who's watched enough things go wrong to know that assumptions are dangerous.
Forest School training teaches you practical things. Fire lighting, shelter building, tool use, risk assessment in natural environments, how to keep a group of humans safe and engaged outdoors with nothing plugged in. These are skills that work whether or not someone is paying the AWS bill. I'm not building a bunker. But I am accumulating skills that don't require a WiFi password, and I'm not being quiet about it.
Call it a hedge. Call it overthinking. Call it a developer's instinct to build in redundancy. When the apocalypse comes and everyone's looking for someone who can light a fire and build a shelter, I intend to be more useful than the bloke who can explain the difference between IEnumerable and IQueryable.
Why Write About It Here
You might be wondering why a Forest School post has appeared on a blog that's otherwise about AI development, SaaS products, and the occasional rant about CSS. Fair question.
The honest answer is that these things aren't as separate as they look. The more time I spend working with AI, the more I think about what's distinctly human. What can't be automated. What matters precisely because it's inefficient and unmeasurable and messy. Sitting in a forest watching a child figure out how to balance on a log - there's no AI for that. There's no prompt that replicates it. It's valuable because it's real, and physical, and happening right now in a way that no digital experience quite matches.
So this is going to be a thread that runs alongside the AI stuff. Not instead of it - alongside it. The tech and the trees. The algorithms and the outdoors. A developer learning to put the laptop down, which frankly might be the hardest thing I've ever attempted.
I've got a lot of training ahead of me. Sessions in the woods, theory to study, practical assessments, and probably quite a few more Rounds where I have to share what's in my heart while my wife watches and takes notes. The growth - all kinds of growth - is going to be significant.
I'm looking forward to it. I'm also slightly terrified. But I'm learning that those two things can be true at the same time, and maybe that's the first lesson already.
The next bit happens in a couple of weeks - three days in the actual woods, doing the actual thing. Time to make sure my boots are warm enough.
