National Education Nature Park top-up grant

The grant is being funded by the Department for Education and administered by the RHS.

There are currently no plans for a Nature Park grant after 2024/25.

If your setting received a Nature Park grant in 2023-24, your setting is eligible for up to an additional £2,000. We will contact your setting in autumn 2024 with full details.

The grant will be paid in advance, so you will need to know how much you will spend before you fill in the application. When we have approved your application for funding and you accept your grant agreement, you are welcome to start buying the items you have included in your application. You do not have to wait for the grant payment to arrive.

We will publish information about eligible items in autumn 2024.

The grant funding is for capital spend only and expert services to support nature and biodiversity improvements. Therefore, the grant funds cannot be spent on training or staff CPD.

The grant can’t be used to pay school employees for their work on your project. This is a requirement of the funder, the Department for Education.

We will publish deadlines in autumn 2024.

The grant agreement requires you to keep all receipts for seven years. We will carry out expenditure audits of some settings, and all grantees must report on how their grant was spent using the Department for Education’s Annex Gii form. We will contact grantees with instructions.

If we have contacted your setting direct, you are eligible for the grant. The eligible educational settings have been chosen by the Department for Education. See the Nature Park funding allocation page to find out how the list of eligible schools and how eligibility was determined. If your setting is not on this list, visit our finding funding page for other biodiversity and outdoor education funding options.

See Nature Park funding allocations page for the list of eligible schools and how eligibility was determined.

If you are a governor or a parent at an eligible school, please share information about the grants with a member of school staff. School staff should check with relevant stakeholders to agree who should fill in the application form on behalf of the school. The RHS will email eligible schools beginning in September 2024 with information about the grants programme. Because children should be involved in the project, we ask that applications aren’t made by e.g. MAT officers. Please see the FAQ for Multi Academy Trust applicants.

We prefer for applications to come direct from the schools themselves. The purpose of the National Education Nature Park programme is for all young people to develop a meaningful connection to nature and lead the way in transforming their own school grounds for nature and people. The programme resources available online provide the framework for children and young people to develop key skills around communication, decision making and creative thinking, as well as scientific skills in biology, natural history and nature identification and recording, and digital skills including data analysis and data visualisation.

The Nature Park process involves getting to know your space and identifying opportunities through developing a deep understanding of the local environment. The grant provides funding for projects that your pupils will identify to suit the context of your individual education setting, as they move through the five-step Nature Park process.

Therefore, grant applications need to be completed by each individual eligible school to ensure that children and young people are involved in the process and that the interventions chosen are tailored to meet the specific needs of each education setting.

There will be an online application form. We will send the link to the form to your lead contact in autumn 2024. Let us know who the lead contact for your school will be by emailing [email protected].

You will apply using our grant portal in Flexigrant. The lead applicant should create a profile. Please note, you will have to register separately on both Flexigrant and on the Nature Park website itself.

We will email you a direct link to the application form which you can access after you have registered on Flexigrant. To be sent the link again, contact [email protected].