There are currently over ten thousand forest school programs in the UK alone. We have discovered that in the senior years, these programs can be anywhere from a half-day a week to full-time full day programs. In the early years, Redwood's target market, the research suggests that full-time programs are much more common. According to a recent study by the US Department of Education, there are approximately 4 million children entering kindergarten every year. Of those children, about 1.6 million attend a publicly funded preschool. In order to close this gap, there has been a large push to increase funding to these areas; we have seen an increase of 200% in funding since 2003. In 2013, President Obama made a bold announcement to start funding towards universal preschool. As it is an emerging market, there was no data specifically on outdoor preschools but if we take a conservative measure of 5% of the market this leads to 80,000 children in the US alone. Taking an even more conservative measure and accounting for only 1% of the market, we are still left with 16,000 students potentially attending an outdoor preschool. After speaking with one the co-founders of Wild Wonder Forest School, we found that in their first year of operations, they had an enrollment of 6 students and that number growing to 30 students in the second year with a waitlist. Below is a table running a few different scenarios based on preschool enrollment assuming a 1% market:
Forest schools are not only a method of delivering content, but also a pedagogical approach. Although this approach can take on many different names, the core is exposing children to nature and leading them through experiential, inquiry based learning; all emerging markets in education. Further, most forest schools are independently owned and operated so a specialized solution like Redwood would be a great fit for the industry.
Experiential learning in K-12We are also seeing an increase in nature experiential learning in K-12 as is illustrated below in a video by the National Environmental Education Foundation. As schools continue to take portions of their classrooms outside and bring nature into learning, the natural progression would be additional preschool schools to serve this market.
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Revenue OutlookIf we aim to capture 20% of the market share of our conservative measure of 1% of preschool students in the United States attend a Forest School, then we would have a subscription for 3,200 students in our first year. Expanding this to our actual global target market, we would expect a number higher than this. Below you will see monthly and yearly revenue stream forecasts for Redwood in the first year of operations:
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