The Forest School Podcast

This week Wem and I dig into Brian Sutton-Smith's The Ambiguity of Play, a book Wem has been quietly highlighting half to death for the best part of a year.
Sutton-Smith's approach isn't to tell us what play is. It's a literature review of how different disciplines, cultures and eras have explained and justified play, organised into seven "rhetorics": play as progress, fate, power, identity, the imaginary, the self, and frivolity. Each one is less a theory and more an ideology, a story a particular group tells to defend its own view of why play matters.
We spend a lot of time on play as progress, the idea that children's play exists to build skills and move them toward adulthood, and pull apart the Montessori line that "play is the work of the child." We talk about what changes when you swap "work" for "labour" or "responsibility," what the Industrial Revolution actually did to childhood as a separate category, and whether competence sits at some percentage below mastery, with play living in the gap above it.
From there we get into children's folklore and what Sutton-Smith calls the hidden transcript, the pranks, teases and nonsense that sit underneath the good behaviour adults expect to see. We talk about animal play research and what it does and doesn't tell us about skill building, the difference between micro and macro satisfaction in a game, and a proper tangent about hares, reflexes and unpredictability as a survival strategy.
We didn't get to everything. Play as fate, festivals, ritual, and flow state all got parked for a future episode, so if you've got thoughts or questions on any of this, send them in and we'll fold them into part two.
The Ambiguity of Play by Brian Sutton-Smith (Harvard University Press, 1997), the book under discussion
Maria Montessori, credited with the phrase "play is the work of the child"
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow state, which Sutton-Smith critiques in the book and which we park for next time
Bob Hughes's work on play cues and play types, referenced for the leaf-falling example
Children of the Forest Patreon, where listeners can support the podcast's running costs: patreon.com/TheForestSchoolPodcast
Get in touch with questions or thoughts for part two by emailing childrenoftheforest@outlook.com, or by leaving a voice message through the Speakpipe link on the Children of the Forest website
Links and references mentioned

Generous Authority: The Art of Gathering at Forest School
This episode, I’ve read a book and Wem’s job is to poke holes in it. The book is Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, and parts of it had me nodding along while other parts felt wildly wrong for forest school. We work through it chapter by chapter, testing each idea against our own sessions and disagreeing where we need to.
The first thing that grabbed me was the idea of protecting the opening moment of a gathering instead of spending it on admin. I tried it at a recent CPD day with the Suffolk FSA group, giving out practical information as people arrived so the opening could hold one thing only. Wem rightly points out that for lots of people, knowing where the loos are is part of feeling safe, so the logistics still matter. They just don’t have to come first.
We also cover:
Asking what’s different after a gathering, instead of why we’re meeting, and the baby shower example from the book
Why I’ve felt nervous about asking my home ed group why they come, and what that nervousness says about ego
Being honest with young people that this is also a job that pays the bills
Excluding with purpose and the risks of over-inclusion, plus Wem’s alternative: not shutting the door, just choosing where you extend the invitation
How venues and physical positioning carry hierarchy with them, from boardrooms to standing over two children asking them to “solve it themselves”
The chill host, the hosting vacuum it creates, and what happens when a couple of boisterous voices take over a circle
Generous and ungenerous authority, and a heated disagreement about a bride enforcing her seating plan
Competing needs versus needs that can sit side by side, including the perennial “they just talk about Minecraft in the hammock” debate
How differently all of this sits when attendance is optional, mandatory, or somewhere in the awkward middle
Hosting starting the moment people hear about an event, priming a CPD group through a WhatsApp challenge, and why a session begins the moment the last one ends
Building in multiple endings so people can leave without guilt, and the small closing ritual we’ve started with staff after the children go home
Plus, before all that: can robins see magnetic fields, and are sharks really older than trees?
Supporting the podcast
The Forest School Podcast has been running for years now, and it’s free for everyone. We don’t offer bonus content or extras on Patreon, so supporting us is simply a way of helping the show keep going. Contributions from as little as £2 a month cover our running costs and buy the books we read and share with you all, including this one. We’re genuinely grateful to everyone who chooses to, and is able to, chip in.
patreon.com/TheForestSchoolPodcast

Declarative language and empathy sit at the heart of how we support behaviour at Children of the Forest. Rather than issuing commands, we describe what we notice and help people see the effect their actions have on those around them. Most of the time, that’s enough to shift things.
There have been a few times, with different groups, where I’ve run into the same wall. The approach works best when someone is visibly affected. What about when a child is talking unkindly about a person who isn’t there? Or when the person being discussed is unaware, or simply unbothered? If they’re happy either way, the drive to change behaviour out of care for them disappears.
This is a professional discussion in the truest sense. We take one idea and turn it over, look at it from different angles, throw “what if” scenarios at each other and push back where we disagree. We don’t come away with a tidy solution, and that’s deliberate. The value is in extending our own thinking, and hopefully yours.
In this episode we explore:
Why empathy-based behaviour support depends on a visible impact, and what happens when there isn’t one
Gossip, venting and “isn’t that person annoying” as a normal part of human social life
How to make room for frustration without endorsing unkindness
Encouraging empathetic conversation without imposing our own will or relying on authority
The tension between letting group dynamics unfold naturally and our duty of care for the social and emotional wellbeing of everyone in our sessions
What being Ofsted registered and holding safeguarding roles asks of us in these moments
Supporting the podcast
The Forest School Podcast has been running for years now, and it’s free for everyone. We don’t offer bonus content or extras on Patreon, so supporting us is simply a way of helping the show keep going. Contributions from as little as £2 a month cover our running costs and buy the books we read and share with you all. We’re genuinely grateful to everyone who chooses to, and is able to, chip in.
patreon.com/TheForestSchoolPodcast

Wem and I get into a concept neither of us had a name for until this week: inessential weirdness. It comes from a video by organisational psychologist Pippi Kessler, and once you've got the term you start seeing it everywhere.
We open with my Ofsted saga (someone reported me to Ofsted over a cropped screenshot of me singing with a puppet, long story, I passed with zero concerns), then get into the real conversation. Pippi's video looks at activist groups and asks what actually alienates working class people from community spaces. The answer isn't posh venues or fancy food, it's things like unsalted vegan potluck dishes and unexplained rituals that have nothing to do with why people showed up.
We spend the rest of the episode pulling that idea apart and applying it to forest school and CPD spaces. Where's the line between weird that's essential to what we do and weird that's just unexamined habit? We talk about whimsical go-arounds, breathwork, sit spots, hierarchy, virtue signalling, agency, and why "can you explain why we're doing this" is the best test for whether something belongs. We also get into the class dimension of all this, how much time, money and prior exposure it takes to feel comfortable with certain kinds of "weird," and why that matters if you actually want your sessions to be open to people outside your existing community.
Not an argument against weirdness. We love weird. It's an argument for knowing why you're doing it.
Watch the video that started this conversation:
Pippi Kessler, "Inessential Weirdness" — https://www.instagram.com/p/DbWVC6rPBaL/
More on Pippi's work:
https://www.pippikessler.org/

In this episode, Wem and I chatted about feedback from previous episodes, preparing for incoming winter seasons, and whether it's possible to 'procrastinate' at Forest School.

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