Level 4 Archimedes Forest Schools Trainer

Join thousands who've already started their Forest School journey

A trainer crouched beside a child, showing her how to hold a tool

Level 4 · Accredited by Open Awards

Archimedes Forest Schools Trainer

For experienced practitioners who want to qualify others as well. You do not stop working with children. You carry on, and you train the people who will do it after you. This is the qualification that lets you train and qualify Levels 1, 2 and 3 in your own right.

£3,997Everything included. Twelve to eighteen months. By application, and not everyone who applies is accepted.

Accredited by Open Awards. Not on the RQF, and deliberately so. The Archimedes Level 4 Trainer Award is accredited by Open Awards, the same awarding organisation behind our Levels 1 to 3. It does not sit on the Regulated Qualifications Framework, which means no other organisation can apply to deliver it. There is one Archimedes Trainer Award, and it comes from us.

What it is

Ethical transmission.

A Trainer's work is not to know more than everyone else. It is to hand something on without distorting it. That takes restraint, and restraint is the hardest thing to teach and the easiest thing to lose.

Trainers are the custodians of quality. Every practitioner they qualify will go on to work with children who will never know their name.

To teach Forest Schools is to influence how children will be experienced by future adults.

A child close to the camera, hand raised, delighted

Before you apply

Six things, and all six are required.

This is a serious bar, and we make no apology for it. The people you qualify will carry our name into settings we will never visit. You must also be 21 or over.

A Level 3 Forest School award

From a recognised awarding body: Open College Network, Open Awards, Agored Cymru, NCFE or BTEC.

A teaching or training qualification

You are about to teach adults. We need to know you have been taught how.

Approximately 200 hours of practice

Working with a variety of client groups, so that your understanding of practice is grounded in experience. If you have built your hours a different way, tell us when you get in touch.

Outdoor or Forest Schools First Aid

Current, and appropriate to your groups. Where you work with children under 12 it must include paediatric first aid.

Public liability and indemnity insurance

Held personally or through your organisation.

The Archimedes Licence Agreement

Signed. It permits you to deliver Archimedes materials under licence and binds you to our quality and safety processes.

We will ask you for a short record of where and when those hours were built, countersigned by the leader you worked alongside or by your employer. One side of paper. It is not bureaucracy, it is what keeps the standard real for everyone who holds it.

The route

How you become a Trainer.

The same route, the same price, the same terms afterwards, for everyone. There are no individual arrangements and there never will be. Expect twelve to eighteen months, depending on how quickly your recorded sessions come back to us.

  1. A conversation first

    Start by reading the enquiry pack. It sets out the whole of it: what you take on, what it costs, what you are licensed to deliver afterwards and what you are not, and what happens to both Boxes if you ever leave.

    Download the enquiry pack

    If you are still interested once you have read it, we talk. Before anything is paid, we talk. We are deciding together whether you should represent Archimedes in your area, and that is not a decision either of us should make from a form.

  2. Your portfolio, built at your own pace and outdoors

    Worked through at your own pace, with a trainer support session each week you can join, our learner support team reachable until you finish, and portfolio guidance whenever you need it. Built in your own setting, not at a desk.

  3. The Level 3 in a Box comes to you

    A complete Forest Schools Level 3, filmed session by session, sent to you wherever you are in the world. You observe every session in it from beginning to end. Face to face observation alongside us too, where that is possible. The Box is included in the £3,997. There is nothing further to pay.

  4. You build your own Boxes

    Then you teach it yourself, and you record it. To qualify you produce your own Level 3 Hybrid in a Box and your own Level 1 in a Box: filmed session by session, with your session outlines and your paperwork, exactly as you would deliver them.

    You submit them yourself. We assess them as they arrive, against the Archimedes Standard, which is why the award takes the time it does. There is no separate Level 2 Box, because Level 2 does not run separately. It runs alongside the Hybrid.

  5. Then, and only then, you train with us

    Once we have watched your Boxed sessions and they are good, you may be invited to train on one of our live courses, on some, any or all of the sessions you have evidenced. We may observe all of those sessions, some of them, or none.

    This order matters. We are not going to travel to watch somebody who has not yet shown us they can do it, and you should not want us to.

  6. You are qualified, for what you have evidenced

    The award is made when the portfolio is complete and your Boxes have been assessed. You are then licensed to deliver Level 3 Hybrid and Level 1, and Level 2 where it runs alongside a Hybrid cohort, which is how Level 2 runs in practice.

    Not the five day Level 3, and not Level 2 as a course on its own. Those are earned afterwards, through standardisation and continuing development, usually within the following twelve months, and evidenced the same way everything else was. Nobody is licensed for a level they have not shown us.

Every year, afterwards

Nobody drifts.

Every Archimedes Trainer returns once a year for Revalidation, where practice is standardised against the current Archimedes Standard. Not to be taught something new. To make certain that what is being taught in Seoul, in Bangkok and in Nottinghamshire is the same thing.

Plus eight hours of your own continuing development each year. That is the whole ongoing commitment, and it is the part that keeps the qualification worth holding.

Afterwards

Three ways to work, and you may choose more than one.

Run your own courses

Book, market and deliver Archimedes accredited training from Level 1 Foundation to Level 3, under your own name, within your licensed area, using the approved Archimedes materials.

Deliver for us

Work freelance for Archimedes when we need a trainer, on the same terms as every other associate.

Build a Centre of Excellence

Establish your own centre and join the Archimedes Associate Network, where trainers share resources, ideas and work.

Every Trainer is licensed for a defined geographical area, and for no other. Areas are allocated by us, never claimed. An area is not a country: Hong Kong is Hong Kong. Six Trainers in the United Kingdom means six areas, so that nobody is ever competing with a colleague for the same schools.

The terms are the same for every Trainer, without exception, and we will set them out in full when we talk. Nobody is on a better arrangement than anybody else.

Everything we license to you is held while you train with us, and we would rather you knew that now than at the end. The terminology, the Forest Schools in a Box videos, the session plans and the Principles and Theories are Archimedes materials, licensed to you for as long as you are an Archimedes Trainer. The Boxes you build yourself are built from them, so they are held on the same terms. If you decide to leave and register as a centre of your own, both come back to us: ours, and yours with your videos, templates and course content in it.

Your qualification is yours, and so is everything you learned. What you hand back are the materials, because they are how a course in Seoul stays recognisable as the same course in Nottinghamshire.

The original Level 4 in this industry.

We accredited it, and were criticised for it. Others followed. The same happened when we first offered a self guided route, and it is happening again now.

Applying

Tell us where you are and what you have done.

There is no checkout on this page and there will not be one. Send us a note about your practice, your Level 3, your qualification and roughly how long you have been running sessions. We will read it properly and come back to you.

Start a conversation
1. You read the pack2. We talk3. You are accepted, or you are not4. Then you pay