The Great Escape provides overnight courses and day trips for Schools & Youth Groups, allowing exclusive use of our site in South Shropshire.

Since 2009 we have been providing a highly personal service to students from Year 3 to 12, specialising in teaching leadership, personal development and team building in the outdoors.

We run day and overnight camps designed specifically to take children out of their virtual lives and back into a world that gets them building again, not just camps and fires, bridges and rafts but character, confidence and friendship.

Our camp staff are friendly, conscientious, highly skilled and great fun. All are used to working with children, understand their needs and have a natural desire to help young people discover and achieve their full potential.

95% of schools that experience The Great Escape return, and many have been coming every year since we began in 2009.

The school camp groups normally camp out in 10-man army tents and experience two to three days with us in the outdoors. Meals are cooked on site and are normally served outside, round the campfire and there is an indoor climbing room that converts to a dining room if the weather is not kind.

On arrival school groups are put into teams, Raleigh, Scott, Shackleton and Columbus. Each team will have an instructor with them at all times to guide them. All the tasks and activities are undertaken in these teams and in competition with their peers. Every student will get the chance to lead and to evaluate their team throughout the tasks.

These are some of the activities we offer:

25 Army based command tasks
Crate Stack
Survival tasks
Fire Stations & Signal Fires
Zip Line
Challenge/Obstacle Course with 20 interconnecting low level obstacles. The objective is to get around the course without touching the ground.
The Great Escape Challenge is a treasure hunt with tablets where the students navigate their way around the 120 acres with tasks to over come at each checkpoint.
and much more…..

By the end of their experience with us we hope that students will have:

Appreciated the value and benefits of team work.
Grown in respect and appreciation for one another.
Developed a sense of self responsibility.
Acquired an effective team leadership model (probably without realising it).
And most of all had fun!

All schools receive exclusive use of the site including the Black Hawk Zip Line and Tiger Challenge Course.

Let your objective based outdoor adventure begin!

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Great Escape Weekend

“In the staffroom we often hear the phrase, "that was the Packwood children at their best"; most often this comment arises after a hard fought match but it could just as easily be heard the day after a school play or then again after a visit to a museum or some such place. All of these occasions (and many more besides) could rightly claim the epithet; however, I would put in a bid for one other event when such a statement would be utterly appropriate and that would be The Great Escape Weekend. For those of you unfamiliar with this event the rules are quite simple….arrive at the bus on time and then behave like children for twenty four hours. No telly, phones, i-gadgets or other trappings of the modern world. Just plenty of fresh air, water, mud, camp fires, scratches, initiative challenges, falling over, falling in, falling out and falling in again. For all those folk out there who think that children are incapable of playing "like we used to" I suggest they come along and see the Packweeds doing their thing at the Great Escape. We really do have fantastically motivated kids with a tremendously "can-do attitude".

Many of the children I took this time were coming along for the second or even third time. They completed the challenges sensibly, efficiently and with just the right amount of competitiveness. I really do believe that the children learn something about themselves and the worth of others on this trip; and if they do so whilst also having fun, how great is that?”

Nick Jones, Packwood Haugh