Welcome, Wildlings!

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Welcome to Conkers Magical Earth Academy, a haven of creativity, connection, and wonder. Nestled in the heart of nature in the stunning Upton Country Park on the Dorset coast, our academy offers enchanting experiences for all ages, blending magic, learning, and adventure to inspire a deeper connection with yourself, the Earth, and the extraordinary possibilities of a connected life.

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Large historic house surrounded by lush green trees and lawn, overlooking a river and distant landscape.
Woman with wavy, light brown hair adorned with a floral crown made of white daisies with yellow centers and some yellow daisies.

Why we exist

Something is shifting. You can feel it.

The world our children are growing up in looks nothing like the one we were told to expect. And the children themselves are different too. Wiser, somehow. More sensitive. More aware. Many of them are struggling inside systems that were built for a world that no longer exists, and a great number are walking away from those systems entirely.

This is not a problem to be fixed. This is a signal.

I was one of these children. At six years old, sitting in a classroom that made no sense to me, I made myself a quiet promise: when I'm big, I'll build a place where children like me belong.

I just knew I didn't fit. So I did what most of us do: I spent decades pushing through anyway, chasing success in the conventional sense. Before the campervans and the candles and the sacred sites, I was a nurse at Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital. I have held the hands of children in their most vulnerable moments, sat with families in the hardest hours, and understood in my bones what it means to care for a child as if they are your own. That shaped everything that came after.

I went on to build a business that fed film sets and famous faces and took me all the way to Netflix and Warner Film where my company fed Gandalf and friends for Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit. It looked, from the outside, like I'd made it.

Inside, it all felt a bit hollow.

So I let go of all of it. The business, the marriage, the certainty. I bought a VW campervan and I drove. What I thought might be a few months became close to four years: sleeping in forests, beside stone circles, at the foot of Cullin mountain ridge on the Isle of Skye, on the edge of the Atlantic. I found my way back to something ancient and real, something I had known as a child and buried under years of trying to be acceptable.

I found my way back to magic.

In the forests of Scotland I reconnected with the wisdom of the natural world, the intelligence of plants and seasons and soil, the quiet knowing that lives in wild places. It was during this time that a chance encounter with a well-known wise elder on a train journey reignited something in me: a belief in the power of imagination, of creativity, of the unseen. And it was here that my six-year-old self stepped forward and reminded me of the promise I had made.

So I built the school.

Conkers Magical Earth Academy exists for the children who already know that the Earth is alive and worth listening to. For the ones who think in pictures, who feel things deeply, who ask questions that don't have neat answers. For the ones who find the standard classroom a kind of quiet violence. For the ones whose gifts have been called problems.

Einstein said it plainly: “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing it is stupid.” We have been judging fish to climb trees for a very long time and now Great Change is upon us and our children are this change.

At Conkers, nature is the classroom. Movement, story, wonder, and the living world are how we learn. Every child's way of being here is honoured. We do not require them to shrink.

Every tutor who works here is highly sensitive themselves. They know what it is to feel things deeply, to perceive the world in ways that don't always have words. They are attuned to the quiet signals that children send, the ones that go unnoticed in a busy classroom, the ones that matter most. Every child who walks through our door is cared for as if they are family. Because here, they are.

If you are reading this, there is a good chance you are one of these children too. Or you are raising one or multiple. Or both.

Conkers is my love letter to Earth and to all children, including the one who resides inside you.

Thank you for reading and thank you to all who make Conkers possible.

Lisa Marie, age 6–46

A young girl dressed as a fairy with translucent wings walking on a stone pathway through a garden of colorful flowers, surrounded by greenery, during daylight.

What we believe

Conkers Magical Earth Academy exists on the understanding that every child arrives already brilliant. The work here is simply to make sure nothing dims that light and that their uniqueness is nurtured and celebrated.

We believe that real learning happens in moments of wonder. In the spark of a question that has no tidy answer. In the feeling of soil between fingers, the weight of a stone, the sound a forest makes when you finally go quiet enough to hear it. These are the moments that shape a child for life, and they cannot be manufactured inside a rigid system.

The natural world is our greatest teacher. It has always been. Within it live lessons that go far deeper than any textbook: the patience of a seed, the courage of a river, the memory held in ancient land. When children are given real space to listen, they begin to hear the stories written into the Earth itself, the messages carried on the wind, the deep knowing that already lives in their own hearts.

We hold imagination, intuition, and sensitivity as the extraordinary gifts they are. Children who feel things deeply, who see worlds that we forgot how to see, who ask the questions adults have stopped asking: these children are precisely the ones Conkers was built for.

And here is what we know, without question: the children here now, and all those still to come, are our teachers. Every single one of them. Our role is to build and hold the safest, most joyful, most magical and nurturing spaces possible, so that they can do what they came here to do: remind us of our true essence.

Our classes are small and mixed in age, and this is entirely by design. There is something quietly extraordinary that happens when children of different ages learn alongside one another. The younger ones watch the older ones with wide eyes and absolute trust. The older ones discover something remarkable about themselves in the act of teaching: that they know more than they realised, that their knowledge has value, that leadership feels natural when it comes from genuine care. Both leave changed. Both leave more themselves.

We believe in child-led learning because we believe that every single child arrives on this Earth with their own blueprint. Their own set of gifts, questions, fascinations, and knowing. A child who is free to follow their curiosity is a child who is alive to the world. And a child who is alive to the world learns everything, because everything becomes interesting. We are all born to learn. The love of it never leaves us; it is only ever buried under systems that forgot to make room for it.

Education here is an adventure. Every child is free to move, explore, question, and create at their own pace and in their own way. We honour the natural rhythms of life, the wisdom of the Earth, and the unique light within every single child who walks through our door.

We believe in magic. Yours, theirs, and the kind that happens when you stop pretending it isn't real.

What we know

Child playing in a shallow stream, wearing a colorful swimsuit, bending down to touch the water, surrounded by rocks and greenery.

We know that every child arrives already whole. Already wise. Already carrying something the world needs, even if the world hasn't worked out how to receive it yet.

We know that the best learning happens in two places: outside in the mud, in the questions nobody can answer, in the moment a bug crosses your path and stops you in pure fascination and we lose ourselves for a moment as an observer of the sheer beauty and wonder of this world. And inside: in the quiet, in the daydream, in the place behind the eyes that adults were told to come back from but children still know how to reach. What we used to call daydreaming, we now understand to be something far more sophisticated. Many children are natural meditators. Natural energy masters. They are already doing the inner work that most adults spend years trying to find their way back to. We do not interrupt that here. We make room for it.

We know that curiosity is sacred. That play is serious work. That a child who is joyful is a child who is learning, whether it looks like it or not.

We know that when a child is truly seen, something in them relaxes that perhaps has never relaxed before. And from that place, everything becomes possible.

We know that no child is here by accident. Every single one of them arrived with a blueprint, a set of gifts, a particular kind of magic that belongs only to them. Our job is to make sure nothing here asks them to put it away.

We know that the Earth is alive and paying attention. That trees hold memory. As does water. That time spent outside, barefoot and unhurried, does something to a child that no classroom hour can replicate.

We know that the children coming into the world right now are extraordinary. We feel it every single day. They see things. They know things. They remind us, constantly, of what actually matters.

And we know that our role here is not to teach them who to be. It is to hold the safest, most joyful, most magical space we possibly can, and trust them to show us the rest.

This is what we know.

This is why we are here.

This is Conkers Magical Earth Academy.

Meet the Team