FAQs
There are different types of session that you can choose from depending upon the age, maturity and needs of your child. Each type of session has particular features in place to facilitate different levels of independent and free play in nature. Visit our Sessions page to find out more, and if you’re considering our ROAM Free sessions, go to the page ‘Is my child ROAM Ready?’
If you are representing a school, take a look at the school sessions we run. We can tailor these to the particular needs of your pupils.
The vast majority of our sessions are free to access, funded by grants. However, occasionally we may need to ask for a voluntary donation, but cost should never be a barrier to participation. We are very fortunate to be funded by a number of grant givers and trusts and have to regularly measure our impact, so where sessions are free, we ask participants to engage in our surveys, questionnaires and other ways of collecting data. We rely heavily on volunteers for our sessions to run, and instead of paying to use the park, we pick litter in the park for an hour on the day of each session. Extra volunteers are always welcome!
Please contact us if you’re interested in volunteering. We’re always keen to hear from new volunteers for a variety of roles across all our different session types, as well as in other roles such as marketing, professional guidance or joining our Board.
There are a few different ways you can support us:
Make a donation – we are a small charity, dependent almost entirely on grant funding, so any donation, no matter how big or small, will go a long way to helping us on our mission. You can make a donation here.
Volunteer – if you would be able to give up some of your time to help us then we’d love to hear from you.
Follow, like and share us on social media – you can help raise our profile and that of our mission to those who care.
Yes! We sell tee shirts, hoodies, tote bags and pin badges. We take orders several times a year, to get the most cost effective prices. All profits go back into ROAM, of course!
We are expanding to other parks, but there’s quite a bit of work involved in gaining consents for new sites, so it’s important that the demand exists. We firmly believe that children should form connections with their local green spaces. We are very keen to support parents close to other parks to get up and running, so please get in touch if interested.
We are proactively inclusive and we try our hardest to ensure that every child can access our sessions. Depending upon their needs, we may be able to make adjustments to our existing ROAM Free sessions to aid participation. Our ROAM-IN sessions have been developed to meet the specific needs of children for whom there are still too many barriers to access our ROAM Free sessions.
Our main focus is for children under the age of 12. It was the lack of unsupervised play opportunities for primary school aged children these days that inspired us to start ROAM. However, we do run sessions for pre-school children too, focussed on building their connection to and confidence in outdoor play in nature. These sessions are fully supervised, but encourage children to develop some age-appropriate independence and team work.
Before sessions recommenced in late July 2020, we used government guidelines to ensure that we could make our sessions compliant with all applicable restrictions and guidance. We have a published policy that was approved by the Local Authority site owners, which is reviewed every time there is a change to the guidance or change in local restrictions. Most of the measures we take are very familiar to children and their parents. All participants must be pre-registered, and it means that our maximum group sizes are very strictly enforced.