Sarah Blackwell- Founder and Director of Forest Schools & Arc
Sarah (45) was born in Ince, Cheshire and adopted at six weeks old. Her adoptive family moved first from Sheffield on to Leeds and moved again to Bristol when she was four to eighteen.
Sarah hated school, running away for the first time at just six years old. She remembers thinking The Osmonds were going to come and pick her up - in their helicopter of course - only her dad, headmaster and a policeman came before they arrived...
An interesting but dysfunctional childhood left Sarah a very confused child. She started being very naughty to gain the love and attention she felt she lacked and seemed to spend most of her primary school years outside the headmaster's office. "This culminated in an incident at ten when I stabbed another girl. I was always trying to be special and started carrying a knife as it made me feel stronger. I had few friends and did not really know how to make successful relationships. My home life was very much 'children should be seen but not heard' and conforming to constraints of adults, as opposed to being free to be a child. Emotions were frowned upon and any displays of highs or lows were discouraged greatly."
At eleven, Sarah had to live her parents', not her, dream of going to a private, all girls secondary school. She recalls scraping in to the school which was ‘very posh', and caused her to live with the crushing agony of wearing red school uniform every day.
"I struggled with friendships, making sense of the world around me. I ran away on a number of occasions, because I felt completely disempowered, hopeless. I became anorexic at twelve, and made up illnesses so I could stay off from school, I guess to get attention and love from my mum, but this did not help. I physically self harmed from fourteen and attempted suicide for the first time at fifteen because I did not know how to successfully ask for help to cope with the emotions I was experiencing - I felt totally alone in the world."
She left home legitimately at the age of eighteen and one day old, taking a job as a residential social worker in North Devon. "Poor kids!", she laughs. "The Residential School owner called Roger Burland had set up his own residential school for maladjusted kids, and he really influenced my life. I worked on the farm, milked cows, caught sheep, helped with hay making, then met a group of local hippies and left my job."
Sarah and six others then embarked on a bus journey around Europe where she.met her husband. "I learnt to juggle and eat fire in a cave in Germany, met some amazing people and wanted to travel for ever, that bus was the first place I felt safe. I came back to Devon, got pregnant, got married with the distain and disapproval of my parents...my dad got very, very drunk at my wedding!
I had my first son, Joe in my Devon longhouse in Goodleigh. The NHS threatened to sue me for endangering the life of my son. Women were not allowed home births back then."
Sarah set up her first business as a seamstress on £40 week, working back at the school I had left and selling second hand clothing and home made clothes, curtains and bags at festivals and the local market in Barnstaple. She worked at Glastonbury and other festivals in the area, helping with the showers and sauna, then went back to Europe for a while in a Leyland FG, an old British Rail transport carrier, when Joe was about nine months old.
We came back to Sheffield for Christmas to be with my husband's family. His dad had died just before I had met him. That was in 1986, and we only came for six weeks! It's quite ironic that I ended up back at the beginning, in a city I first came to at 6 weeks old."
While Sarah was still selling clothing at festivals, she set up a company providing corporate events and summer play schemes around the country, juggling, unicycling and fire eating, which turned out to be very lucrative. She even won the talent competition on a family Butlin's holiday for blowing fire and laying on glass! During this time, she was also working in an Old People's home before she had second son Aaron. "I had to move out of the bus as the NHS would not condone having a baby in the bus, except the midwife got stuck in traffic, so my husband delivered our son- we got quite famous in the midwifery community for that!"
With two young boys to look after, Sarah took on a short term role as a professional childminder, but increasingly came to realise that something was not right with Aaron's development. At the age of five, Aaron was finally diagnosed as being autistic, which Sarah found very challenging. despite being supported by her husband's family.
Sarah continued working and setting up playschemes with children learning circus skills. The development opportunties the children took part in enabled many to feel happy and restored a sense of self worth.
"I'd had my daughter Elly, was now working in a day centre for people with learning difficulties, moved jobs to an outdoor centre, then the strain of spending five years thinking Aaron's behaviour was all my fault and the constant juggling finished my marriage off."
After the split up from her husband, Sarah left her job and enrolled at Sheffield College. Her lecturer influenced her so much, she became and outdoor instructor: climbing, caving, canoeing and mountain leader, then went on to university to study countryside recreation management at Sheffield Hallam and gained a BSc.
During this time she was also working part time commuting to Stockport as an outdoor development officer, helping to develop an expedition programme at the same time. At five months pregnant, Sarah decided to cycle across Portugal and as she entered her final year at university, her son Euan was just ten days old. She got a first. "He was either tucked up my jumper, or I had a nanny sitting outside the lectures so I could feed him throughout the day. Euan came to graduation, but spent that night at the Children's Hospital on oxygen as he suffered from asthma."
Her next steps were to prove foundational to her life's work- Forest Schools.
"I did my PGCE in Business Education, then worked at Thornbridge, the outdoor activity education centre for a year. I went to visit a Forest School in Oxford and was trained by (an amazing guy called Gordon Woodall, who inspired me to leave and set up my own company, Archimedes Training, developing and delivering Forest School training programmes since 2001."
In June 2008, Sarah set up Archimedes Social Forestry. Until recently, Sarah was renting part of the Sheffield City Council sawmill site to run her Dangerous Adventure clubs, holiday clubs and parties together with her daughter Elly. Elly, one of a handful of elite UK trampolinists, has just moved to study business and management at The University of Cardiff and is looking into setting up Dangerous Adventure Club franchises, starting in Wales.
Sarah is justifiably proud of all her children. Joe is now 25 and runs his own clothing business by Devonshire Green in the city centre, regularly making visits to China and Thailand to source stock. Aaron is 23, has recently left Freeman College and is living semi-independently with a personal assistant working at Lane End Farm, a charity which helps young people where he is training a sheep dog called Layla. Elly, 19, is at Cardiff University studying business and management and her youngest, Euan 12 has just moved to his local secondary school.
Sarah concludes, "It has been a difficult and painful journey at times, but I am at the stage now, when in my forties I can see how looking back, all these pieces have come together like a jigsaw. While at the time some of the obstacles I have faced have seemed insurmountable, I can now see that each of them has in its own way, however impossible it seemed at the time, provided a platform and a route to where I am now.
The one thing I love above all in my role as lead trainer and director of Archimedes Training delivering Forest School across the country and now developing internationally.
My hopes and desires are that I get to help other people, young and old, many like me who have faced difficulties and battles in their own lives, to enable them to know they can move on through the training and become the people they want to be. What they gain are national qualifications and the ability to train others in life changing techniques, but in the process their own lives are also being changed."
Sarah has a BSc in Countryside Recreation Management, a PGCE and is licensed to teach outdoor education to national qualification level 5 by the Open College Network.
She speaks at national and international conferences on Forest School ethos, children's development in the outdoors, outdoor learning and now Beach Schools.
She has appeared in the local press and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio Sheffield on subjects as varied as national media stories, self harming, runaways, anorexia and teen suicide.
Her new series on Forest Schools is running in Nursery World magazine and she has written for Horizons and Living Woods magazines. Internationally, Sarah has written for an Australian early years magazine and commences Forest Schools Training there in 2011 She is currently writing her first book called "Forest Schools - the essential guide."
Sarah can be contacted at Forest Schools on 0114 2855534 or mobile 07957 496161
http://www.forestschools.com/ http://www.social-forestry.co.uk/