If you are a parent who home educates your children (or who are planning to do so) in or around Bristol, you may be interested to hear about Stonebury Small School which is being introduced by Stonebury Learning Forest School this month.

The Stonebury Small School is a place to learn, to grow, to wander and to play for school-aged children.

Catering to the home education community locally, as well as to families who want to flexi-school their children, The Stonebury Small School is an unstructured, child-led and process-driven learning environment where children are free to explore their passions, free to explore nature and free to pursue their interests under the careful guidance of Stonebury Learning’s team of educators.

As well as all of Stonebury Learning’s usual lovely woodland activities, children are also free to work with adults to develop their learning, whether that’s investigating the natural world, improving their artistic expression, working on storytelling – or anything else they can dream up.

The emphasis will be on developing children’s confidence, self-awareness, creativity, verbal expression, physical wellness and above all, to engender a sense of fun and wonder within the natural world.

In time, the aim is to make this provision daily and to grow our resource collection to mean that children can take part in more ‘traditional’ learning areas such as literacy and numeracy. However, this will be done organically and democratically as the needs and wishes of the children grow and develop.

Following the February 2016 Half-Term, there will be three Monday drop-in sessions (29th Feburary and 7th and 14th March, 10am – 2pm) where families can attend together to ask questions and see whether they’d like to enrol.

You can follow the Stonebury Learning Facebook page to be kept up to date with those days.

Children are welcome to attend two sessions to see whether this is a commitment they wish to make, and following that the enrollment will be termly.  The first sessions will take place on Monday 18th April from 10am – 2pm and will run until 18th July.

Initial trial sessions are £10 each (to be debited from termly fees after enrollment) and the termly cost (3 x 12 week terms) is £195 – fees are pro rata for children joining after the beginning of a term. Sibling discounts and bursaries are available by application.

If you would like more information about Small School, please contact Jenni at Stonebury Learning on info@stoneburylearning.co.uk or visit http://stoneburylearning.co.uk/small-school/