It was around the same time her friend told her about the bush school she and another mum were setting up for home-schooled kids.

It was perfect timing. Jessica enrolled her daughter at Bush Magic Adventures in Mt Keira and watched as a remarkable transformation took place in her anxious 11-year-old.

Being able to move around freely, satiate her endless curiosity about the natural world and have "independence and autonomy over her decisions and choices" brought a swift end to the nail-biting and emotional distress.

"She didn't want to go back to school once she experienced this," said Jessica, who has a background in child care and took up a job at the bush school not long after after her daughter started there.

"It was a definite, 'no way, Mum, this is awesome'.

"I've seen her mature so much, and also become a lot more relaxed, a lot more happy. Massive changes."

Simone Potter and Katrina Venables opened their small bush school at the forest-encircled Girl Guides camp in February 2022 as a place for homeschooling parents to drop off their kids twice a week for a day of play, socialising and bush skills.

That initial cohort consisted of 16 students. Two years later, the number has swelled to 300.

Bush Magic Adventures now employs 20 staff members and runs multiple programs at two different sites (the second is located at the base of the Dapto escarpment), catering for babies and up during school hours, after-school and holidays.

With a ratio of one adult for every eight children, the students spend their time exploring, playing in the creek and on the swings, making bushcraft, learning archery, lighting campfires, climbing trees, scrambling rocks and building structures out of ropes, tarps and natural materials.

There are times to come together as a group to eat lunch or take part in facilitated activities, but play time - which is most of the time - belongs to the children.

It's a child-led model that's seen an influx of mainstream kids attending once or twice a week in lieu of school.

"Some kids have a therapeutic need, so it's seen as therapy, but most of the kids who attend from mainstream schools are recorded as an unexplained absence from their regular school, and it comes from parents who really value outdoor time," Simone said.

"There seems to be less outdoor and unstructured play in schools at the moment and so parents really see their children thrive through play."

Katrina and Simone say the fresh air and freedom has a dramatic effect on the wellbeing of kids who are being sent home early or routinely suspended by under-resourced schools that can be ill-equipped to deal with autism, ADHD and other special needs.

"When they arrive, we're like, 'hey, this is our playground today. This is our school. What do you wanna do?" said Simone, who has a background in counselling and teaching.

"It's almost like they let their guard down and they're like, 'oh, I get to choose? Can I go light a fire?' 'Yeah, let's go light a fire'.

"And once they realise they can decide what they want to do, we often find that they're more willing to do the things they're asked to do anyway."

At a time when the Department of Education is cracking down on student attendance, Simone says the principals she's dealt with have been supportive of missed days, especially when they see the positive changes in the child when they return to the classroom.

"They're more engaged, they've had that opportunity to regulate their body through all those outdoor activities," she said.

"In school they're kind of forced to sit in the classroom, pay attention, sit quietly. Here, they don't have that pressure."

It's for this reason the co-founders have no plans to turn their venture, the only one of its kind in the Illawarra, into an accredited school.

While insurance cover for a business of this type is pricey and government grants would help bring down enrollment fees, it would mean integrating the NSW curriculum into their way of doing things - a compromise the co-founders are unwilling to make.

"It would change what we do too much," Katrina said, who notes a researcher from La Trobe University has been working with them to study the link between forest schools and resilience and wellbeing.

"We're actually happy being a bush school and meeting the needs of all those people who don't get their needs met in a formal school environment."

Teaching bush survival skills, Simon said, has been an avenue in which to build emotional intelligence, self-confidence, conflict-resolution and risk-assessment skills in the kids.

"They're all the underpinnings of learning, if you don't have those things you can't learn," she said.

"We're kind of always doing counseling with kids, but it's not counseling, it's life - so they're learning how to live life through experience.

"I always say to parents, the main things you need to know are how to read and how to do basic maths - and all the other things that you learn in school, they're dictated to you by whoever is doing the curriculum at the time.

"They're not necessarily what you have to know - what you have to know is how your world works and how to get on in your world. And so that's what we're teaching here."

On a Wednesday morning at Bush Magic Adventures, the kids are hard at play.

A couple of primary-aged children are hauling brown palm fronds out of the bush for the construction of their hut; two tween girls are perched atop a giant rock getting to know each other and a preschooler is gluing flower petals to heart-shaped cardboard wands, a gift for her sisters.

In another corner of the green campus, a young boy is bouncing on the middle of a thick stick that's refusing to break. His persistence pays off and he drags the two halves to his growing stick pile, one of the sharp ends coming a little too close to someone standing nearby.

A facilitator takes a step forward, not to confiscate it, but to show him how to hold it so it doesn't hurt anyone.

Katrina says safety incidents at the school are "very low". This is despite the kids learning how to light fires, then passing on this knowledge to the younger ones, using work tools, climbing trees (always three points of contact) and taking part in other "healthy risks".

The idea is to set the kids up for success, trusting them to prove themselves capable - and watching as their confidence grows.

"We want everyone to be treated with respect and have agency over their own actions and what they're doing, and feel valued for who they are," Katrina said.

"So we're kind of trying to create that, I guess in a little section of our world, and hopefully that ripples out into the rest of the world."

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