Should Outdoor Learning be Compulsory?

 

I read a thoughtful article recently entitled ‘Should Outdoor Learning in Schools be Compulsory?’ by Joe Bogumsky (outlearn - https://outlearn.co.uk/should-outdoor-learning-in-schools-be-compulsory/). It’s a very good question to ask. Joe presents a convincing argument of the benefits of Outdoor Learning (OL), including statistics from the Natural Connections Demonstration Project, 2012-2016 (view report here: http://publications.naturalengland.org.uk/publication/6636651036540928) which overwhelmingly point to the importance of including OL in our curriculum.

In the school where I teach, we have recently begun a journey of promoting OL, initiated and supported by the Nature Friendly Schools project (https://www.naturefriendlyschools.co.uk/) and it has certainly garnered a lot of enthusiasm from the pupils and staff involved. It is starting small – focussing on a group of pupils from Year 3, 4 and 5, and largely delivered by the staff who support the welfare of pupils in school. The eventual aim is to involve all pupils and all staff, but this is a journey, and all journeys begin with secure, small steps (made a bit smaller perhaps by the lockdowns as we are experiencing at the moment, but still going forward).

The Nature Friendly Schools project aims to ensure teachers are confident in delivering OL, which will then facilitate the outdoor learning experiences for pupils. In addition, we are looking at the impact of OL on engagement and attainment – does OL make a quantifiable long-term difference in addition to anecdotal evidence?

Is now the time to say that OL should be compulsory, for all schools? Schools are rarely utterly ready for new initiatives (if they were, would they need them?), but they work hard to adapt to what is needed and monitor the resultant impact. Would this not just be the same for OL? Should we just make it mandatory and then just get on with the changes needed to ensure it works?

It sounds tempting – a little bit of ‘cheese-moving’ stress for an ultimately beneficial goal? In Joe’s article, he fully acknowledges the factors which restrict the pursuit of OL (work load, pressures of providing results, feeling out of their comfort zone, not having outdoor space or resources). He also outlines the considerations at a managerial level which would need to be discussed and actioned even before OL could become part of the whole-school approach, which include integrating OL within the curriculum; the cultural change needed within the school; leading to developing personal development and review cycles to adapt to what is and isn't working; and also the training of staff to ensure the secure planning and delivery of OL.

I conducted a questionnaire with the staff in my school recently to gauge where we were with our ability and desire to embed OL within our curriculum.

In brief, the staff would feel fairly confident to take a class of pupils outside for OL and see it as very important to do so. They would be willing to spend at least 1 hour outside, though a number would do more time outside if they could. They generally felt that it would be possible to teach at least part of the curriculum outside, although they raised the restrictive factor of how individual progress would be measured to justify the time outside.

This is where the deep reasons of why OL could falter – how would it be justified to external visitors when they came in and would it detract from the other enforced pursuits of attainment and progress? There is some evidence of how OL benefits attainment (the Learning through Landscapes webpage https://www.ltl.org.uk/outdoor-learning-and-attainment/ provides five studies on the benefits of OL on attainment – for example, one study states that students involved in an OL project for 2 hours per week over 12 weeks gained an average increase of 6 months for Mental Arithmetic and 2 months for General Maths). However, there is still the need for developing a larger base of evidence to reassure schools and school visitors that OL provides a net benefit to attainment.

The expected standards within the school curriculum dictate a rigorous and deep level of learning in reading, English, maths and all of the wider curriculum. And quite rightly – pupils deserve a rich, engaging and purposeful curriculum. It would be the subject of another post for sure, but here I would question if all that needs to be learnt in a primary school is essential – are children’s lives worse off if they are not able to understand and apply the subjunctive form? The curriculum and resultant monitoring of schools through the end-of-year 6 SATs means that it is rare that the foot can be taken off the pedal of accountability of results-orientated teaching and learning – ensuring that the majority of pupils attain a certain standard (and get their prescribed SATs percentage and progress points) is often a matter of life or death for many schools. The feel of needing to evidence what the pupils have done (a fair part of it is insurance – if the results aren’t what was hoped, at least there’s work in the books to show they have done it and shown progress) can distort what is best for the pupils. As a result, if a school implements a programme of OL, it could just be seen as a new initiative or an ‘intervention’, not as an intrinsic development of the school. If staff feel compelled to ‘do’ OL because they have to, they may abide with it until they can then drop it to pursue the next initiative – and so ends the story of a potential embedding of OL within the school.

A clear case study of how subjects suffer when they cease to be a focus has been the teaching of science in primary schools. When it was a SATs test, science was taught rigorously in schools. Attainment was 88% nationally in 2009 (when they were last mandatory in primary schools). Teachers have assessed science each year since – often the national attainment for science hovers around 80%. However, there has been much evidence to suggest that the focus on science and the resultant pupil understanding and attainment in science has dropped – ‘plummeted’ as Schools Week reported in 2016 (https://schoolsweek.co.uk/science-tests-scores-plummet-for-primary-pupils/), where they stated that a report by the Standards and Testing Agency (STA) showed that the proportion of pupils achieving level 4 (age related expectations at that time) or above in science had dropped from 84% in 2012 to 63% in 2014. Bi-annual science sampling tests by the STA have shown that the proportion of pupils estimated to be performing at the expected standard was much lower, decreasing slightly from 22.3% in 2016 to 21.2% in 2018 (view the STA report ‘Key stage 2 science sampling 2018’ on the government website for details). Note the contrast to teacher assessment. Why this plummeting of attainment in science? Teachers and assessment experts believed it showed that teachers were spending less time on the subject, probably because they channelled the time to focus on reading, writing, maths and GPS to reach the prescribed governmental standards. Science ceased to be a focus, ‘life or death’ subject for schools. Thank goodness for the Association of Science Education, Explorify, many other inspiring organisations and the enthusiastic, determined individuals in schools who continue to promote science and ensure it doesn’t become a ‘dead’ subject.

For outdoor learning to truly benefit pupils, a school has to understand why OL is beneficial and then really believe in what they are doing. This needs to be integral to the whole school ethos, supported by most (I’d love to say all) staff and that it believed as an important pillar of the school’s development. They need to be allowed to take risk and have flexibility to take advantage of the changing natures of the days and seasons. They need a secure set of resources, training and inspiration, so that schools are facilitated in ensuring that have what they need and that lack of knowledge, confidence or plans/equipment does not provide a barrier for providing OL.

A school can believe in OL, but if it is still pursuing SATs results in a life or death situation, then is it possible for the school to have the confidence to give the space and time needed for outdoor learning to flourish? Unless the government changes its relentless pursuit of standards, its dictated percentages to reach prescribed standards and the vast amount of knowledge expected for each pupil to reach the standards, the implementation of OL will always be at risk of being second best and becoming just another initiative; at great risk of dying a death as people lose impetus in following what other people have told them what to do.

So, should OL be compulsory? No, not yet. If it were made compulsory now, I fear that it would be too much, too soon, and would conflict with current government foci and goals. It would run the risk of being implemented as a scheme, the next initiative, instead of being an integral aspect of education that schools and teachers truly want as part of their curriculum.

But if you were to ask me, “Should we be heading towards making OL compulsory in schools?”, then I would say yes. Let’s create the support structure and the readily-accessible wealth of resources needed to allow this to happen. Let’s build up national confidence in OL through volunteer schools and spread the word as to why OL is beneficial so that schools will want to be a part of it, not have to be a part of it. Let’s make OL a common language so that it’s still not something new or niche, but it’s naturally something that we do. Let’s get the government to commit and reduce the amount of questionable standards which adults think is a good idea for children to memorise, and really sort out what is useful and makes a true difference to children’s lives. Let’s get rid of the life-and-death culture of SATs for school monitoring purposes… or am I taking that a step too far?

Fortunately, projects like the Nature Friendly Schools are promoting this path to be trodden, and I look forward to the day when OL is made compulsory, not because we have to, but because we want to.