Should schools teach in the wild? COVER STORY Would children benefit from an hour of outdoors learning a day?

Outdoors learning could be an ideal way for youngsters to connect with the natural world, but are teachers and policy makers prepared to back the idea?

Acouple of years ago, when my younger son was seven, his school project for the term was ‘home’. The class learned about bungalows, flats, terraces and semidetached properties, and the children also thought about what ‘home’ meant to them, and what it might be like not to have one.

So, when he and I walked across the field to school one winter morning and saw that the low sun had illuminated dewdrops on thousands of spider webs on the grass and along the playground railings, I shot excitedly into the classroom and accosted his teacher.

“There are spider webs, sparkling with dew – they’re beautiful! Can we take the children outside, right now?” I gasped as pupils milled around. The teacher peered at me with a mixture of bemusement and alarm. I tried again. “Spider webs! You know, spiders’ homes – like the project you’ve been doing.” I could see I wasn’t getting through, but I pressed on. “Can we take the kids out to see them? It won’t take long.”

The teacher smiled at me distractedly and – maybe I’m imagining this – a bit pityingly. “Well, there’s registration and then I have to take the lunch order,” she said, frowning. “And we’d need more adults, as it would be off school premises. Sorry.” She mustered a polite smile. “Perhaps another time.” I flushed and backed out of the classroom, feeling naive, foolish and cross.

Stomping homewards, I raged at what I felt had been a sorry failure to grasp the excitement of dashing outside and glimpsing those spider webs in all their sparkly glory. Of course, the children never were taken to see that glittering wonderland, and an opportunity to engage with an everyday, yet dazzling, aspect of our natural world, and a chance to learn how webs are constructed and what they’re made from, was lost.

In truth, it would be wrong to condemn my son’s teacher – doubtless she had a carefully planned lesson schedule to work through. But I was left mourning an education system in which spontaneity has become scary, and the notion of taking children outside to walk along a pavement on a quiet road requires multiple adults and a formal risk assessment.

The Wildlife Trusts wants to change all that. In its recent report studying the impact of nature on children’s well-being, it recommended that all primary age children should spend part of every school day learning outdoors. The call comes after the organisation studied research commissioned from University College London, which surveyed 451 primary school children participating in a range of outside learning activities.

The results showed that children not only experienced an overall increase in their well-being and health but that they also felt more connected to nature, had a greater level of enjoyment and motivation, and wanted to protect their environment more than they had before. Importantly, the highest increases were felt by children with the lowest initial levels of well-being, nature connection and pro-environment values.

As a result, The Wildlife Trusts is calling for a change in government guidance to schools, requiring a minimum of one hour a day to be spent outdoors in wild play and learning. Cue a collective groan from overstretched teachers across the land?

The Wildlife Trusts is well aware that teachers are already very stretched, says strategy director Nigel Doar: “If you say to them ‘No more resources, keep the existing inspection regime, now just add some more stuff on, will you?’ it’s not going to work. “But we think it is possible to deliver the existing curriculum with a much heavier focus on the natural environment. You can teach kids their five times table by taking them out into the school grounds and getting them to collect ash keys and conkers and group them into fives – and then they’ll also learn which trees they come from.”

So how have the political parties responded to The Wildlife Trusts’ hopes for a regular dose of outdoor learning? “The only one that springs to mind is the Green Party, which, for quite a long time, has taken up the same call for an hour outdoors, and which also wants a Natural History GCSE,” Nigel says. “The other parties have taken a much more general approach – the education stuff is the education stuff and the environment stuff is the environment stuff, and there doesn’t seem to be much crossover.”

He’s right. Despite the global impact of Greta Thunberg’s school strike campaign – with millions of pupils worldwide marching out of their school gates, demanding action to protect the planet – take a look at the three major UK parties’ manifestos and there is little to demonstrate an appreciation that children might benefit from learning anywhere but inside the traditional four walls of a classroom.

“That 90 minutes in the woods was actually carefully planned to cover seven areas of the curriculum.”

The Wildlife Trusts acknowledges that changing schools’ standard operating procedures will take a change of mindset. But at the Council for Learning Outside the Classroom, chief executive Anne Hunt says that her organisation’s own research has shown that it’s not the cost, time or effort involved in making the switch that’s the biggest barrier. “It’s actually having the confidence to know what to do, and how to link it up with what you’re doing in the classroom,” she says.

Leanne Manchester, co-ordinator of The Wildlife Trusts’ education programmes, agrees. “What you often find in schools is there’s one teacher who’s really passionate, but if it’s not ingrained in the school as a whole, it can be really difficult for them to do it. But with the right training and leadership, it’s completely doable.”

To be effective, however, outdoor education cannot simply be a question of marshalling children outside to fill in the same maths worksheet as they would have been asked to complete while sitting at their desks. The unique attributes of being outside need to be imaginatively deployed, says Mark Leather, associate professor in outdoor learning and adventure education at Plymouth Marjon University.

“Being outside makes your experiences authentic and sensate,” he says. “There is an argument that before we have emotion, before cognition, we sense the world: we see it, we smell it, we feel it, we touch it, we taste it and we hear it, which is why outdoor learning is such a powerful pedagogical tool.

“Culturally, and I would argue genetically, there is something in us that means we embrace being outside but, in a post-industrial society, we have become distanced from it,” he adds.

On a cold, misty day at Wilden Primary School in Stourporton-Severn, 30 woolly-hatted, waterproof-clad reception children are sitting in a circle on treestumps under a tarpaulin. Their Forest School-trained teacher, Sharon Mason, is coming to the end of a story about hibernation.

“Now, if you want to go and finish off making your hedgehog, the stuff is over there,” she says. Some children skip towards the mud table. Others gather around a campfire, where marshmallows have been skewered, ready to toast. A fiveyear-old boy swishes a lard ball through a tray of birdseed to make a feeder. Meanwhile, one of his trowel-wielding classmates peers up at acting headteacher Charlotte McDonald (who says outdoor education is a fundamental part of this school’s learning ethos) and asks “Can you see the toadstools on that log?”. Charlotte squats down to inspect a piece of rotting wood. After a quick chat about how fungi grow, the little boy remembers his trowel. “I’m going to dig for worms now,” he announces, and wanders off.

The morning’s session looks unstructured, but Sharon explains that the 90 minutes the children are spending in this small patch of woodland behind the school building has been carefully planned to incorporate seven curriculum areas, including maths, communication and language, and expressive arts and design.

How do the children respond to learning outdoors? “They’re much calmer outside,” says Sharon. “There are no restrictions on noise, they can move around and choose what they do. Even toasting a marshmallow: if it gets burned, we’ll look at what the heat has done to it – and that’s science.”

Many of the national curriculum requirements against which Ofsted measures school performance can be delivered while embedding children’s learning in nature, Mark believes. “Numeracy and literacy can be taught, experienced and understood outside: how do you estimate height – well, find a tree and use some estimation techniques.”

And for children who struggle with being in a classroom six hours a day, heading outdoors can transform the way they engage with learning. “If you want to get children, particularly boys, to write poetry, if you’re out in nature and you play some environmental games and you scaffold the task with ‘I see, I hear, I smell’, it just makes more sense and so they respond,” Mark says.

Anneliese Emmans Dean, poet, performer and founder of The Big Buzz, runs outdoor primary school workshops mixing science with poetry. She says the “sheer excitement” when children discover an unseen natural world in even the most tarmacked of playgrounds is why she wants to “grab them and show them that you don’t have to fly off somewhere exotic to see amazing creatures.”

Even if there’s no green space, she explains, minibeasts are everywhere. “We might become a millipede getting

longer and longer as it gets older, or we become a spider, and four of them have to walk around with eight legs,” she says. “I’m trying to show them the world through the eyes of a different creature. What’s the world like if you’re a millipede? I’m hoping that empathy will extend beyond the natural world, to their interactions with each other.”

Levels of enthusiasm from staff for her visits can, however, “range wildly”, she observes. “Sometimes the teachers hang back and talk all the time, which is dispiriting, but if the teachers are on fire, then it’s fabulous, especially if they’ve never seen a shieldbug either, and they’re going on the same journey as the children.”

Not everyone loves getting muddy, and it's a challenge to tackle the perception that learning outdoors has to involve getting wet and cold and climbing mountains. An aggressive approach to fighting against, and winning out over, nature is not necessarily helpful.

“Take Bear Grylls,” says Mark. “His view on outdoor education and activities is very macho – man versus wild, ‘I’m going to conquer it.’ He makes great TV shows that are really popular with boys and some girls. But let’s suppose you’re an early years or primary teacher – often young women – and if your image of going outside is that you have to drink your own urine and eat a rabbit, then it’s not surprising they’re wary.”

Ultimately, The Wildlife Trusts sees children spending an hour a day learning outdoors as part of a process that will both prompt and require a deep systemic change in many areas of public policy. The old approach to nature conservation, “which is, ‘stick a fence around it and look after it’, is really not working,” says Nigel.

Some things are already changing. In October, Plymouth Marjon University is planning to launch a new degree called Outdoor Learning in Primary Education. “I would love to see some guidance – a statutory requirement – that this needs to be part of [all] teacher education,” Mark enthuses.

A government-funded project called Nature Friendly Schools is also focusing on outdoor learning to support mental health and well-being and, Nigel hopes, will “provide data robust enough to influence future policy”.

Back in the woodland at Wilden Primary, Sharon laughs as she rescues a marshmallow that has just been incinerated over the campfire. It’s all a learning opportunity, if you can just see it that way, she points out. “Even collecting sticks for the fire – we’re counting and comparing long sticks and short sticks – that’s maths skills.

If you do it all the time, it starts to come naturally.”