Space to Learn, Richmond Magazine, September, 2025

Headteacher Leanne Barrett tells Deana Luchia why her school isn’t just an inside job

Visiting the Liberty Woodland School in Morden, my first thought is what a perfect setting it is for a picnic or a game of rounders. The 3.5-acre site, leased from the National Trust, is flower-filled and lushly green, with trees to climb and a meadow to run through. The only signs that this is an educational establishment are the large bell tents containing desks and the children on logs reading books.

Founder and headteacher Leanne Barrett is showing me around. I tell her how different this is to the schools I went to, none of which allowed walking on grass, let alone running in meadows.

“Here, children are encouraged to choose their learning environment,” she explains. ‘They know what’s going to work best for them. If they’re doing poetry and one of them says ‘I work better in the greenhouse,’ or ‘I work better in the meadow,’ they can do that – as long as they remain within the sight of the teacher, who can support them. Much of the time outdoors is the best environment for learning.”

There are currently 130 children (boys and girls, aged 4-16) enrolled here. In years 1-6 they follow the school’s own curriculum, before studying for the International Baccalaureate (IB) in senior school.

“The IB is a lot harder than GCSEs,” Leanne tells me, as we tour the grounds. “It’s very academically vigorous and so we prepare the children thoroughly in our primary school.”

But the focus is not entirely academic.

“The WEF [World Economic Forum] publishes an annual report called The Future of Jobs. According to the latest one, the skills employers need are critical thinking, independence, emotional intelligence, leadership, the ability to collaborate and the capacity for lifelong learning – all things not taught in traditional schools. And you can’t expect a child to become a problem-solver unless you teach them how to go about it.”

All the students begin each day of the four-day week by sitting in a log circle talking to their teachers about feelings.

“We’re teaching them about emotional intelligence and how there’s no such thing as a bad feeling,” explains Leanne. “The optimum state for learning is to be calm and focused and grounded. The children learn first to identify their emotions, and then individual tool-kits and strategies to transition from one emotion to another.”

A child’s toolkit might include going for a walk, having a snack or reading a book – whatever ensures that they are calm, focused and ready to learn. The whole focus of school, insists Leanne, should be on wellbeing.

Barrett’s interest in education began when she was exploring nursery options for the first of her three children.

“I didn’t want her to go to any of them,” she explains. “They felt almost industrialised, rather than offer a personalised education. And there was almost no outdoor space.”

So she and her husband opened their own nursery, Little Forest Folk, in Wimbledon, based on the Scandinavian model. Leanne went on to set up a primary school, and then a secondary school, as their children aged. All three now attend the Woodland School, and with the oldest already 15, Leanne plans to expand again by opening a sixth form.

Project-based learning is the favoured mode, with history the focus for the current term.

“We want everybody to understand how to become a historical enquirer; how to research, how to evaluate sources of information, how to do chronology,” says Leanne.

At the end of each term, the children’s work is shown to parents in an exhibition. “We don’t want it to go straight into a teacher’s filing cabinet. Work here matters – it’s real-world stuff and is shared.”

We’re in the senior school now, with a science lab and pretty rooms called ‘collaboration spaces’. Pupils can choose from sofa-style seats, low chairs and high stools, or even stand as they learn. With plants and artwork, these spaces are intentionally more coffee shop than classroom. Yet for all the freedoms and options at Liberty Woodland School, discipline remains strong.

“Some people think that because we’re progressive, it means we’re hippy-dippy, baking bread all the time. But actually, in order to have the enormous freedom we’ve got here, it has to be underpinned by more structure and more rules than in a traditional school. We have really high expectations of behaviour and teach the children how to regulate themselves, to be kind, trustworthy and respectful. We’re building good humans as much as we’re doing times tables.”

For more info visit: libertywoodlandschool.com

This article originally appeared in the September 2025 issue of Richmond Magazine.