The end of the summer term always feels like a good moment to pause and take stock, and this year it’s marking two milestones at once.
Over the course of this academic year, I’ve had the privilege of working with four different year groups at Langrish Primary School — which means this term’s group is our fourth cohort there. Watching a new set of faces go from a bit unsure around fire and tools to confidently building shelters, lighting fires, and working as a team never gets old, and doing it across four year groups in one year has been a brilliant way to see how those skills build on each other as the children grow.
It also happens to mark session 50 — the 50th session Greenwood Bushcraft has run in Hampshire schools since we started. Fifty sessions of muddy hands, proud faces, and the particular kind of quiet concentration that comes over a group of children the moment they’re trusted with something real. It’s easy to lose count of these things term by term, so it feels worth marking properly.
None of this happens without the schools and staff who make space for it in an already packed curriculum, or without the young people themselves showing up curious and willing to have a go. Thank you to everyone at Langrish for another great year, and here’s to the next fifty sessions.
If your school is interested in bringing bushcraft sessions to your pupils, get in touch — I’d love to talk about what that could look like for your year groups.