Educational Visits at Bolton Environmental Resource Centre

Your visit at Bolton ERC will be run by LWT Education Team, a highly skilled and experienced team of environmental education specialists who pride themselves on providing exciting and innovative programmes that inspire children and young people about the natural world. We run Education visits at a variety of sites across the region (Brockholes Nature Reserve, Mere Sands Wood, Bolton ERC, The Hive and Lunt Meadows), as well as outreach sessions, Forest School programmes, Forest School training and outdoor learning CPD training for schools/ groups.

When booking a school visit led by our Education team, your school will have the use of the indoor classroom, which is located upstairs in Environmental Resource Centre. The indoor classroom has a floor to ceiling windows that look out onto Seven Acres Nature Reserve. Toilets and hand washing facilities are available for our Education Officer led visits.

You will have an enthusiastic and experienced member of the Education team dedicated to your group throughout your visit, guiding the children on their outdoor adventure.

At Bolton ERC, we are able to take school groups of up to 35 children (maximum) each day for Education visits. 

At Bolton Environmental Resource Centre we run two full day workshops: Rivers or Habitats.

The workshops available at Bolton ERC are listed further down the page, by age group. Our visits at Bolton ERC are recommended for Primary Schools Upper KS1 and KS2 (Year 2 and above) due to the workshop activities and the nature of the outdoor terrain.

All our workshops are fully risk assessed and suit and complement the goals of the National Curriculum. 

Visiting children and adults will need to bring to wellies to wear to participate in the kick sampling activity (river dipping). 

School groups can arrive at Bolton ERC from 10am and leave around 2pm-2.45pm. We usually run two workshops in a day visit (morning and afternoon). 

In terms of accessibility, wherever possible we try to make our activities as inclusive as possible. However, due to the nature of the terrain at Seven Acres, we wouldn’t recommend this site for wheelchair users. This is because of the uneven paths and steep/hilly terrain which would make it extremely difficult for wheelchair users to move around the site for the workshop activities.

If you have a wheelchair user in your group, you may be interested to know that our team also run school visits at Brockholes Nature Reserve (Preston); Mere Sands Wood (Rufford) and The Hive at Moss Bank Park (Bolton), as these sites are more accessible. Please be aware that we offer different workshops at different sites. If you are looking for similar programmes, we offer Habitats workshops at both Brockholes and Mere Sands Wood, and we offer River themed workshops at Brockholes. (Please be aware that we cannot take the children into the river for safety reasons at Brockholes as the river is too wide, deep and can be fast flowing, so we can’t measure the flow etc. of the river during your visit, so we have alternative activities in our Rivers themed workshop at Brockholes.)

The cost of all our Education Officer led visits can be found on our how to book page

Workshops suitable for Upper Key Stage 1 (Year 2) : 

• Habitats

The full list of workshops for all age groups can be seen on our Workshops page.

Workshops suitable for Key Stage 2: 

• Habitats
• Rivers

The full list of workshops for all age groups can be seen on our Workshops page.