Forest School Risk Assessment: Site Checks and Session Plans With AI

Write two linked documents: a site risk assessment for the place, covering trees, ground, water, boundaries and access, and a session plan that adds the day's weather, group and activities, with a short dynamic check at the start. AI can draft both from your notes. The leader walks the site, edits every line and signs off.

Most forest school paperwork fails in one of two ways. Either it is a vast generic document nobody reads, or a thin tick sheet that misses the actual hazards of the actual wood. The two-layer structure below fixes both: a stable site assessment that changes slowly, and a one-page session plan that changes every time. AI is useful for the writing, which is the dull part, and useless for the walking, which is the part that makes the paperwork true.

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Why two layers beat one long document

A site risk assessment describes the place and what could go wrong there, whichever group is using it. A session plan (some call it the session risk assessment) describes one visit: which group, which activities, what the weather is doing and who is leading. A dynamic risk assessment is the leader's live judgement, made continuously and recorded in a line or two when it changes a decision.

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Keeping the layers apart matters for three practical reasons. The site assessment can be reviewed on a schedule instead of rewritten weekly. The session plan can be short enough to fill in at the gate in five minutes. And a record of dynamic decisions ("moved the group away from the stream after rain; fire circle stayed") shows an insurer or an inspector that the paperwork matches practice.

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Walking the site before any AI is involved

Take a clipboard, or a phone with a notes app, and walk the whole area you use, including the route from the car park or gate and the emergency access. Do it in a way that mirrors how children move, which means low as well as upright. Photograph anything you will describe in the assessment and file the pictures with the date. A good site walk has a fixed order so nothing is skipped:

1. Boundaries and access. Fences, gates, roads, paths, any public paths crossing the site, how the group enters and leaves, and where a vehicle could reach in an emergency.
2. Overhead. Dead branches, hanging limbs, trees with cavities or fungal growth, species that drop branches in wind.
3. Ground. Slopes, roots, holes, stumps, boggy areas, broken glass, litter, animal waste.
4. Water. Streams, ponds, ditches, puddles after rain; depth and bank stability.
5. Plants and wildlife. Poisonous plants and fungi, nettles and brambles, ticks, wasp or bee nests.
6. Fixed features. Fire circle, shelter area, toilet or hand-washing point, storage for tools.
7. Communication. Phone signal in each part of the site, and what you do where there is none.

Record what you saw in a few short lines for each area. Raw notes are what you feed the AI. A sample of your notes might read: "North path: roots across the path at the second gate, wet and slippery in rain. Large beech by the shelter, one dead limb about 5 m up over the seating logs. Stream at east edge, about 30 cm deep after rain, banks undercut. Signal weak beyond the fire circle."

Turning notes into a site assessment with AI

A site assessment needs, for each hazard: what it is, who might be harmed and how, the controls in place, how serious the residual risk is, and who acts. A simple table holds all of that. Give the AI your walk notes and ask for exactly that shape. Because the notes describe real conditions, remove names and the exact location of the site before pasting, and use a business plan on a tool that does not train on your content.

You are helping a forest school leader draft a site risk assessment.
Below are my notes from walking the site. Turn them into a table with these columns:
Hazard | Who could be harmed and how | Existing controls | Further controls needed | Residual risk (low/medium/high) | Review date.

Rules:
- Use only the hazards in my notes. Do not add hazards I did not mention.
- Write controls as actions I could actually take ("rope off the area beyond the beech",
  "brief children on the stream boundary"), not general statements.
- Where my notes do not say how serious something is, mark residual risk "leader to decide".
- After the table, list any hazards you think my notes might have missed, as questions for me to check on site.

My notes:
[paste notes]

The final instruction is the valuable one. You ask for questions, not additions, so the AI prompts you to check things (tick habitat, livestock nearby, spring flooding) and you decide whether they apply. An illustrative row of its output might read: "Dead limb over seating logs | Children and adults seated beneath; head injury | Seating moved 10 m east; area marked with rope; limb reported to landowner | Landowner to remove limb; do not use area until done | Medium until removed, low after | Review after removal".

What you would fix: if the AI had written "low risk" for the stream without knowing the depth or banks, you would change it to a rating you can defend and add a boundary control. AI errs towards tidy, reassuring ratings; your job is to rate honestly. The method for checking drafts like this is covered in drafting risk assessments with AI and what a human must check.

The session plan: one page that gets filled in each time

The session plan is short because it has to be used. It sits on top of the site assessment, adds what changes day to day, and gives the leader a record. A workable layout has five blocks.

Ask AI to build the blank template from your site assessment once, so the activity list and the controls match what you already wrote. Then use it as a form. The AI is not needed again until you plan a new activity, at which point you can ask for the controls for that activity to add to the plan. Check anything that involves fire, tools, ropes or water against your own training, your insurer's conditions and your awarding body's guidance, because those carry the greatest consequence if the advice is wrong.

Weather triggers you write down in advance

A trigger is a decision made in advance so that nobody has to argue on a cold hillside. State the condition, the measure and the action. The exact thresholds are the leader's call, set with reference to the site, the age of the group and the insurer's conditions. The figures below are examples of the format, not recommended values.

Notice the "stream above a marked stone" row. A trigger you can see beats a trigger that needs a number or a judgement call, because anyone on the team can apply it. Painting a line on a stone at the depth where you decided to close the bank costs nothing and replaces an argument.

AI can help you present the triggers clearly and spot those you have not covered, such as fog, a nearby event or tree work. It should not set the thresholds. Ask it only to format the table and suggest conditions to consider, then fill the figures in yourself.

Ratios, supervision and who does what

Write the adult to child ratio you will use for each activity and where it comes from. The source might be a regulator's requirement for the age group, your insurer's conditions, your awarding body's guidance, or your own policy, and the tightest of these wins. Plan on more adults per child for higher-risk activities, such as a fire, than for free play. Do not ask an AI tool to supply the numbers: the current requirements depend on the age group, the setting and the rules that apply to you, and a confident wrong answer is the exact error to avoid.

Name roles rather than just numbers. For each session, state the lead leader, the qualified first aider and the person holding the emergency contact sheet. For fire or tool activities, name who supervises the activity and who keeps eyes on the rest of the group. Spell out what happens if someone is injured: who stays with the casualty, who calls, who takes the group away from the scene.

First aid cover is an easy gap to leave blank. A leader whose certificate lapsed last month is a hole in the paperwork. If you run several leaders, a tracker of expiry dates is worth building; the approach in issuing and renewing first aid certificates with AI works from the other side.

An example session, written up end to end

Take a made-up half-day session for a group of 16 children aged six and seven, with three adults plus the leader, in a mixed woodland with a small stream. The plan includes a hot chocolate round the fire circle and shelter building.

The leader reads the forecast the evening before: rain in the early hours, light winds. On arrival at 9.15 the leader walks the site and finds the stream higher than the marked stone, a branch down across the north path, and wet roots on the slope. The session plan is amended in three lines. Stream area closed, with the boundary marked by rope. Branch moved aside and reported to the landowner. Shelter building shifts to the flat clearing instead of the slope.

At 10.30 the wind picks up and the leader watches the canopy for ten minutes before deciding to continue but to stay in the clearing, away from the large beech. The decision is recorded in one line: "10.30 wind rising, canopy moving; stayed in clearing, beech area avoided." At 11.30 the fire circle runs as planned with the supervising adult named at the fire throughout. The whole record is one page, took about eight minutes at the gate and three more at the end, and shows exactly why each change was made.

A second site, to show the method bending

The same method gives different paperwork on a different site. Imagine a half-acre of wet woodland with a pond at one end, used by a small after-school club of eight children. The walk notes read: "Pond has a shelving bank, dense reeds on the far side, a small jetty with two loose boards. Ground boggy near the pond all year. Hawthorn thicket by the entrance. Signal good."

The AI draft returns the usual table, and you edit three rows. The pond row gets a "high" residual rating until the controls are real: a fence or rope line a set distance back from the bank, no adult-free access, and a rule that the jetty is out of bounds until the boards are replaced. The AI had suggested "supervise children near water", which is an intention rather than a control; you rewrite it as an action with a named person and a physical boundary. The hawthorn row stays low, with a note to brief children about thorns and keep a first aid kit with tweezers and plasters at the entrance.

Notice what is different from the earlier site: the main control for this wood is keeping children out of one area, whereas the earlier wood relies on triggers and shelter choices. A good assessment looks like the place it describes. If two of your sites produce nearly identical documents, ask whether the walk was thorough.

Mistakes that look like paperwork and are really gaps

Four patterns turn up when leaders review their own records, and each has a simple fix.

• Controls that are intentions. "Children will be supervised" is not a control. "One adult stationed at the rope line at all times" is. Read each control and ask whether a stranger could see it being done.
• Copied hazards. A paragraph about venomous snakes in a wood where none have been recorded, copied from a generic template, buries the hazards that matter. Remove anything you have not seen or have a reason to expect.
• No review trail. A site assessment dated two years ago with no review notes looks abandoned even if it is accurate. Add a review table at the end with a date, a name and one line saying what changed.
• Silent changes. A new activity, a different group age or a new area of the site that never made it into the assessment. Add a rule: any new activity or area triggers an edit before it runs.

Seasonal reviews and keeping the AI draft honest

Woodland changes with the year, so schedule a full re-walk at the start of each season and a short walk after storms. In autumn, look at leaf cover hiding holes and fungi appearing. In winter, check for ice and for ground that is frozen unevenly. In spring, expect boggy ground and new nests, and in summer watch for dry, brittle branches, heat and insect stings. Each walk produces a few lines of notes; paste them into the AI along with the previous site assessment and ask: "Update this table with the changes in my notes and mark each changed row." The marked rows are what you check line by line, and the review table gets one new entry.

Keep each version of the assessment in a dated file instead of overwriting, so the record shows what was in force on a given day. If an incident is ever investigated, the version that applied on that date is what matters.

Briefings, children and consent

Paperwork is one control among several, and the strongest controls are the ones children understand. Write the briefings into the plan: the boundaries (a visible rope or a named marker), the "stop" signal, the rules for tools and fire, and how to ask for help. A short rhyme, or a physical boundary the children help to build, makes the rules stick. AI can write age-appropriate wording for each briefing; read it aloud before using it, as it often runs longer than children's attention.

Parent and carer information also belongs with the assessment: a letter or form covering clothing, medical needs, allergies, consent for the activities and emergency contacts. These contain personal details, so keep them out of AI tools unless you have removed the names, and store the originals securely.

Checking the paperwork before an insurer or inspector does

Once a term, run a short audit. Choose one recent session and test whether its record could answer five questions. Who was leading, and were they qualified on that date? What was the weather and was any trigger reached? Which activities ran, and what controls applied? What changed during the session? When was the site assessment last reviewed, and does it mention the hazards that the session notes mention? If any answer is missing, change the template rather than blaming memory.

AI can help with this too. Paste a de-identified session plan and the site assessment into a business-plan chat and ask: "List anything in the session notes that is not covered by the site assessment, and anything in the site assessment that the session notes suggest is out of date." Treat its list as prompts to check, and go back to the site to confirm.

When you are ready to extend the system to other outdoor provision, the same layered approach carries over to a school trip risk assessment and to nursery risk assessments, and the overall rule never changes: AI drafts, the leader walks, and the person who signs has read every line. The AI hub lists more tutorials of this kind.

Questions forest school leaders ask about risk paperwork

What is the difference between a site and a dynamic risk assessment?

A site assessment covers the place: trees, water, boundaries, ground, access and emergency routes, written before use and reviewed on a schedule. A dynamic assessment is the live judgement during a session, as conditions or children change. Good practice records the dynamic decisions briefly, so the paperwork shows what actually happened.

Can AI write the whole risk assessment?

It can draft the structure and wording, but it has never seen your site or your group. The leader walks the site, rates the risks, and signs. Treat AI text as a first draft to be edited against what you saw, never as an assessment in its own right.

What adult to child ratio should I write down?

Write the ratio your own policy, insurer, awarding body or regulator requires for the age group and the activities, and then say why. It is sensible to plan on more adults than the minimum when fire, tools or water are involved. Check the current requirements for your setting; do not take a number from a chat tool.

How often should the site assessment be reviewed?

Review it at the start of each season, after any storm or major change, and whenever something is reported. A ten-minute walk before every session, noting anything new, catches what changed since the last review. Record the date and initials each time so a gap is visible.

Further reads

• Lone Worker Risk Assessment for Cleaners: Early Starts and Client Sites — Lone working, relevant for early site walks.
• Tree Surgeon Risk Assessment Template: AI Drafts, You Sign Off — Tree hazards from the professional's side.
• How to Write a Health and Safety Policy With AI and What to Check — The policy these assessments sit under.
• Can AI Write a Care Home Fire Risk Assessment? What Stays With You — Another assessment where the signer owns the result.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: general risk assessment practice (hazard, who is harmed, controls, residual risk, review); the leader's own insurer, awarding body and regulator guidance must be read directly.