The Wood School was established by Sylva Foundation to bridge the gap between education and the wood industry. It is inspiring and educating the next generation of designers, makers, consumers and woodland owners in the value of home-grown timber.
Sylva Foundation is a national charity working for a society that lives in harmony with nature, focusing on the stewardship of our forests and the utility of homegrown timber. It provides solutions to meet significant environmental challenges by innovating, collaborating, training, and advocating.
Wood School workshops are located at the heart of the Sylva Wood Centre in south Oxfordshire. The Wood Centre is a 12 hectare former agricultural site, brought back to life as a wood hub, encouraging the use of homegrown timber by supporting skills, enterprise and innovation. It is home to a community of businesses, the Future Forest, including a Forest School site, and a reconstructed Anglo-Saxon house.
The Grain store workshop is a spacious and well organised space, benefiting from lots of natural light and heated using wood waste. Equipped with industrial quality equipment to process solid timber and panel products the workshop is home to our professional courses.
The Teaching Barn is a multi-purpose space, easily transformed from workshop to classroom, perfect for hosting presentations, seminars, and events, as well as a wide range of practical short courses.
Our Professional Course bridges the gap between education and industry by bringing the learning to life. We focus on batch producing live projects with a range of collaborative partners.
Annually our inclusive Summer Schools attract a diverse group of students for a week of creativity and craft working exclusively with homegrown timbers. These special experiences shaped our thinking to develop a Woodworking and Gender project that aims to tackle the poor gender diversity in the sector.
Our People
Our Community
We build long-term partnerships and collaborations.
Wood School uses Grown in Britain certified, homegrown timber whenever possible in our projects. We believe in the importance of a sustainable supply chain, provenance, and reduced ‘timber miles’. We have been a certificate holder since 2023. Grown in Britain are a Wood School partner who support our annual Summer Schools.
We regularly collaborate with the National Trust designing and making collections of furniture, made from their own timber and available to purchase from their online shop. In 2024 the Ebworth collection of ash stools was awarded a Wood Award for Production Furniture.
Rycotewood (Activate Learning), our local college, is a Wood School partner. We host and support an incubation workshop specifically for a graduate to join the Wood Centre community.
We host educational visits from students interested in learning about woodland management, homegrown timber, our Wood School and community of designer-makers. Recent visitors include; Building Crafts College, Moulton College, Nottingham Trent University, Oxford Brookes University and Rycotewood.
Forestry for Woodworkers, a CPD session for industry professionals, has been delivered to our partners in the sector including; Benchmark, Bill Cleyndert & Co, Ercol, and Gaze Burvill.
The learning on our Professional Course is brought to life by working on real live projects. We balance education with commercial reality through considered collaborations using low volume production as a vehicle to develop practical skills through repetition.
We have successfully delivered product collaborations with Benchmark, Drayton Hives, Gaze Burvill, Joined + Jointed, National Trust, Oxford University Botanical Gardens and Soundabout.
We offer a making service for designers and manufacturers; who have products that cannot be integrated into their own production, who wish to test out low-volume production in homegrown timber and are interested in supporting education and social enterprise. We work in collaboration with timber suppliers/woodland owners to find value in their own timber and demonstrate viability of a local model for homegrown supply. We can provide design development support to our partners in a variety of ways to generate outcomes that combine our shared aims.
If you wish to learn more or informally discuss potential opportunities for collaboration please contact us.
Our Partnerships
Joined + Jointed
Designed by Sylva Wood School alumni, Phoebe Oldfield, the Dendro table was selected as the winning design for Joined + Jointed Generations 2022. Having produced…
National Trust
The ambition for our partnership is to create sustainable products using wood grown on land cared for by the National Trust. We have collaborated to…
Soundabout
Oxfordshire-based charity Soundabout believes that everybody deserves to have a voice. They believe that people with severe and profound learning disabilities including autism should have…
University of Oxford Botanic Garden
In 2014 an iconic black pine (Pinus nigra) growing at the Botanic Garden in central Oxford split in half and had to be felled. Planted…
Drayton Hive
Our very first collaborative project was to make a batch of Drayton Hives to the unique design of an Oxfordshire bee-keeper. Andrew Bax contacted us…
Gaze Burvill
This ongoing collaboration was born out of our shared values and aspirations for sustainability, innovation, excellence and celebrating homegrown timber. Gaze Burvill and Sylva Wood…