Founders’ Day Celebration

On Friday, 4th October, the whole School came together for our inaugural Founders’ Day.

Founders’ Day is about celebrating our Forest School heritage, who we are, and our Forest School community. This year, we looked back over the 185 years that Forest School has been open and part of the rich history of the surrounding area.
Foresters have always been philanthropic – indeed, the School was founded on these very principles. With this in mind, we launched an ambitious pupil-led fundraising campaign to raise money for a bursary place at Forest (100% fee remission). We hope this hugely generous action will be the start of a longer-term project to create more bursaries in due course.

During the celebration assembly in the sports hall, our Charity Captains talked to pupils about what we are doing and why – including our “pounds for jobs cards” for our younger pupils in Prep School, and our “grow a tenner” for Senior School pupils. The whole School then congregated to sing “Sweet Caroline” in order to reap the pledge that had been promised!

One of our pupil campaign leaders explains the drivers behind the Founders’ Day bursary fundraising campaign:

“For many of us, the reason for choosing Forest was the wonderfully diverse school community we would be joining. There is absolutely no one type of pupil at Forest and we don’t want there to be. We want the pupil body to be as broad as possible. However, we also realise that the opportunity to attend a school like Forest comes at an increasing cost and we are therefore keen that the legacy of our particular generation of Foresters is to ensure at least one more pupil who would not otherwise be able to attend Forest can join the School in September 2020. For us that is what Founders’ Day is about. We are prepared to work extremely hard to make this happen because we are determined to make a difference in this way although, being Forest, the hard work and commitment to the School shouldn’t rule out having some fun along the way!’