Your Forest Committee will be the leaders of your LEAF journey. They will be responsible for coordinating your LEAF actions and communicating your LEAF message to your school and wider community. The committee can be any size and include any age range. The level of support given by staff should be flexible to meet the needs of your committee members, but we would like your committee to be pupil-led as much as possible.

You can download a participation certificate for your Forest Committee members

Your LEAF Action Plan is the place where you can keep a track of your LEAF aims and activities. It is also a great tool for checking your progress at the end of your LEAF journey.

Your first step in starting your Action Plan is to choose one or more Themes for you LEAF journey. Your Theme/s will help you focus your LEAF work on subjects that are important to you. Visit our Theme page to help you choose your Theme/s.

Once you have chosen your Theme/s, you can get started on creating your LEAF Action Plan. You can use our Action Plan template or any other format you choose. Your Action Plan should contain your aims for your LEAF journey, how you plan to achieve those aims (your actions), who will carry out your actions and when, and how you will tell if your aims have been achieved.

You need a minimum of three actions to qualify for your LEAF award.

You need to ensure your actions cover the LEAF aims:

• Increased opportunities for pupils to connect with nature.
  
  • This can be in any greenspace you have access to.
• Progress in learning taking place outdoors.
  • This can be within or outside your school grounds.
• Learning about, protecting and restoring forest-based ecosystems.
  • This includes tree-based ecosystems in urban and rural environments, marine forests and micro-forests (moss and lichen).

Our LEAF resources page has lots of additional resources to help support you in meeting these requirements.

Once you have your Action Plan, it is time to start carrying out your actions.

You need to make sure that you are involving your whole establishment and your local community in your LEAF work. As a minimum, this involves communicating your LEAF work to your establishment and local community. This can be in person or online.

You could also invite members of your local community to join you and collaborate on your actions to help improve your outcomes or organise events as part of your LEAF work that you invite members of your local community to. For example, tree planting activities or fundraising events.

You can write your Forest Code before, during or after carrying out your actions. Your Forest Code can be in any format, including a poem, song, video or artwork.

As part of your Forest Code, you could include encouraging people to spend more time in nature, how to protect nature, the importance of forest-based ecosystems to people and the planet, or anything else from your LEAF journey that you want to share.

Below you can see some examples of Forest Codes.

Once you have carried out your actions, it’s time to look back and see if they have been successful.

There are two parts to checking your progress:

1. Repeat your Awareness Survey to see if there have been any changes in connection to nature in your establishment.

2. Revisit your Action Plan and decide if you have achieved your aims. Reflect on what went well and what you would like to do differently in future.

Don’t worry if some of your actions could not be completed or were not successful in achieving your aims. Please still include them in your final award submission. Let us know what you learned from these experiences and what you would like to do differently next time.

Once you have completed all steps of the Forest Cycle it is time to submit your award application. To apply please complete the LEAF online application form. You will be asked a series of questions about your LEAF activities and you will be asked to upload final version of your LEAF Action Plan.

What happens next?

Once we have received your application, we will review it and determine if you have covered the award requirements. Please keep an eye on your emails, in case we have any questions regarding your application.

You will be informed if you have received a LEAF award within 3 weeks of submitting your application.

If you are successful, you will be sent a certificate to say you are a recipient of a LEAF award.

Your LEAF award is valid for one year from the awarding date. At the end of this period, you will need to submit a new award application to continue your LEAF status.

Starting your next Forest Cycle

You can begin work on your new LEAF journey at the start of the next academic year.