Pupils have spent the year with their hands in the soil, learning ancient plant lore and building a forest garden that will feed the school for generations to come.

Children at Clare Community Primary School have spent the past year immersed in the rhythms of the growing year, tending an ambitious vegetable garden in the polytunnel and a newly planted forest garden as part of the school’s Growing Nature Academy — a stock-free, chemical-free, organic horticulture programme founded by the Vegan Organic Network (VON) and VINE. This year-long programme at Clare has been created in partnership with Juliette Bryant of the School of Earth Wisdom.

Across assemblies, after-school clubs and year-group sessions, pupils have grown a remarkable range of produce, including corn, carrots, garlic, leeks, squash, courgettes, cucumbers, tomatoes, turnips, peppers, aubergines, salad leaves and an abundance of culinary and medicinal herbs. Alongside the vegetable beds, the school has planted a forest garden of fruit bushes, fruit trees and herbs, designed to mature into a living, low-maintenance food source for the whole school community.

The children haven’t just grown food — they’ve learned to transform it. Sessions have taken pupils from harvest to apothecary, making healing balms, apple cider vinegar, cough syrups, bath salts, natural perfumes and bug sprays, all using ingredients grown or foraged on site. Wildflower seed packets, made and packaged by pupils, have been sold alongside surplus produce at regular school sales, giving children an early taste of enterprise as well as ecology.

The learning has gone deeper than the garden bed. Each child has kept their own growing diary and materia medica, recording what they’ve planted, harvested and made, while dedicated sessions have introduced pupils to the mythology and folklore of the plants native to their own land — connecting science, history and storytelling in a single lesson.

Dedicated sessions for SEN children have become one of the quiet triumphs of the programme, offering a calm, sensory-rich space where pupils can work at their own pace among the plants. Staff have seen a marked difference in children’s anxiety and mental health as a result, and the benefits have rippled out to support the wellbeing of the whole school community, giving every child a place to slow down, focus and feel grounded.

For head teacher Mrs Stranger, who has been a pioneer in bringing the programme to Clare Community Primary alongside Juliette Bryant, this sits at the very heart of why the Growing Nature Academy matters. Children hear so much negativity about the state of the world, she says, and it breeds anxiety — whereas the Growing Nature Academy gives them something different: positive, practical solutions they can hold in their own hands. Mr Dawson, Year 3 teacher, has been closely involved in delivering the sessions alongside her, bringing the programme to life in the classroom week after week.

This year the children have also built their own compost bins, learning first-hand how food waste and garden cuttings can be transformed into rich, living soil rather than sent to landfill. Alongside this, pupils have explored the hidden world of the mycelium network beneath their feet, discovering how fungal threads connect plants underground, share nutrients and information, and quietly hold the whole garden together — a lesson in interconnection that reaches well beyond the flower beds.

The programme’s impact was recognised at the highest level this year, when local MP Nick Timothy visited Clare Community Primary School to see the Growing Nature Academy for himself. He toured the polytunnel and forest garden, met pupils, and heard first-hand about everything from their growing diaries to the healing balms and apple cider vinegar they’ve made. He was visibly struck by the scale and ambition of what the children have achieved, and by what a programme like this could mean for young people more widely — leaving with a clear message for schools everywhere: