Somewhere to bring them back down.
Our outdoor sensory spaces are built to be played with and enjoyed by all children, but underneath the hood they are built primarily to be a regulation destination for the young people who need it most: time outside, a contained, engaging safe space, working at their own pace, turning frustration into creation with no stressful learning curve. Helping you collect evidence you can actually use.
Every teacher or TA knows the moment: a child is dysregulated, the classroom has stopped working for them, and there’s nowhere to take them but a corridor. There’s no point pushing a dysregulated child to do more work or to make more effort or in many cases even listen to reason — nothing useful happens until they’ve come back down.
We build our outdoor sensory spaces as a place to bring them. It keeps children occupied, safely contained and fully engaged, and it transmutes the negative energy that was driving the disruption or the frustration into something positive — creative output you can see and hear (and capture as evidence!). Regulation isn’t a side benefit, it’s the purpose it’s built for.
This comes straight out of ten years of lived Forest School practice: the same children who couldn’t cope in a classroom, thriving the moment the environment changed. And this is backed up by the research we are now collecting, on how sound, light, colour and the ability to create and interact with them in a positive way help regulate sensitive nervous systems. We bring that environment onto your own grounds.
Run an arboretum, heritage site or garden? The outdoor sensory space has a page of its own for venues.
What a session looks like.
Everything in the garden is designed to be interacted with. A stepping stone answers a footstep with a low, warm tone. A sculpture catches the sunlight and scatters it across the grass. A hand near a sensor sends colour rippling through water. Every instrument is tuned to the same musical key, so nothing a young person does can clash with anything else — there is no wrong note, no wrong way to play.
Nobody performs. Nobody is herded. A young person can spend the whole session at one instrument, or drift between them, or sit at the edge and let it settle around them — and the quiet way out is part of the design: space to step back, regulate, and return when ready.
Because everyone’s input weaves into the same shared soundscape, something else happens too: young people who find conventional socialising exhausting or impossible end up creating together — connection through the doing, with no social script required.
A low bar to creation — and no grading.
A lot of the frustration behind dysregulation comes from falling behind peers — ADHD, autism and sensory sensitivities getting between a child and keeping up. The garden takes the bar to creation as low as it will go: the instruments are tuned so there’s no wrong note, and it’s art, so there’s no wrong colour either. We’re not grading them. We’re not judging them. There’s no forced pace and no structure to fall behind — a child explores it at their own pace, driven by their own intrinsic motivation, and that’s the whole point.
Regulation and the record — both at once.
Teachers and TAs care about their children, and they also have to work within the system and tick the boxes that need ticking. We’ve designed for both. The garden gives you the observations your paperwork needs — which instruments draw a child in, how long they stay, what they return to, how they engage alongside others — and those observations map naturally onto EHCP outcomes and the Engagement Model, because exploration, persistence and initiation are exactly what the garden is built to draw out.
And a session produces something you can keep. Film it on the iPad you’re already carrying and you have a piece of the child’s own creative work to show a parent, put in a book or bring to an annual review — not just a log of minutes spent.
How it might look: a Tuesday morning.
It’s ten past eleven and a Year 4 child has hit the wall — the classroom is too loud, the work isn’t happening, and everyone can feel where the morning is heading. A TA walks him out through the side door and down to the garden. For the first few minutes he just stamps on the stepping stones, hard — and every stamp comes back as a warm, low tone that can’t be made to sound wrong. The stamping slows. It starts to become a rhythm. He finds the colour panel answering his hands, stays with it a while, goes back to the stones and tries them softly. Twenty minutes later he has made something — the TA filmed the last of it on the iPad — and the energy that was about to take the morning down has gone into the work instead. He walks back in ready to sit down.
Three ways it can live with you.
- Pop-up We set up for a few days or a half-term, deliver the sessions, and remove it without a trace.
- Rotating The core stays; instruments refresh on a rolling basis, so there’s always a reason to return — and the favourites remain.
- Permanent A dedicated outdoor sensory space, built into your own grounds, yours for every season.
We work to your space, your needs and your budget — from a corner of a playground to the grounds of a residential setting. Quieter, tailored private sessions outside public hours are available too. The design thinking behind all of it — grounding before everything else, freedom of pace, energy turned into creation — is set out in how we design the outdoor sensory spaces.
Start the conversation.
Email info@interwovenartscic.org and tell us about your setting, your grounds and your young people. We’ll share how we work, what a visit or residency could look like — and the full plan if you want it.