The Big Debate: How can outdoor learning sector boost access for all young people?

Panellists

Dr Anne Hunt, chief executive, Learning Outside the Classroom

Hunt became chief executive in 2020 after stints at Natural England and the National Trust.

LOtC’s purpose is to ensure all children and young people can benefit from regular, progressive, high quality learning beyond the classroom as part of their development.

It operates the LotC Quality Badge scheme, endorsed by the Department for Education and Welsh Government.

Dr John Allan, head of learning and impact, Inspiring Learning

Allan is an academic and qualified outdoor adventure practitioner and is also a visiting fellow at Sheffield Hallam University.

For more than 25 years, he has worked as an external consultant for business leaders, primary schools and refugee migrant populations, focusing on positive psychology, strength-based learning and resilience building.

Inspiring Learning is a global adventure education provider.

David Watts, director of outdoor learning, UK Youth

Watts is responsible for the delivery of UK Youth outdoor learning strategy to ensure it is widely utilised as an equal and valuable part of the ecosystem that nationally supports young people.

He leads UK Youth’s 65-acre outdoor activity centre and historical grounds and buildings at Avon Tyrrell, which is operated as a successful social enterprise business within excess of 30,000 visitors per annum.

How important is being able to access outdoor learning opportunities to the holistic education of young people and their wider health and wellbeing?

Anne Hunt: “It’s essential because the evidence is now strong and consistent that learning outside the classroom in natural environments or outdoor adventures is unique in that it delivers such a wide range of positive outcomes: to health, wellbeing, learning, pro environmental outcomes, socio emotional development and it’s universally available.

You just step outside and it’s there. There are no other interventions I can think of that offer so much, so relatively easily. So it’s essential and happy, healthy, confident children and young people make happy, healthy, confident learners, and health and learning knit together so intimately.”

John Allan: “It’s crucial. The pandemic showed that it is a basic human requirement to have access to natural spaces. We learn best through multi-sensory experience. Young people need that to identify who they are, why they are, and connecting to the wider community.

The adventure element gives that feeling of overcoming adversity. And it’s a grounding for fundamental motor skill development, working with others sociability, brain growth. We know that exposure to natural spaces helps young people with neurodiversity issues.

Recently, Inspiring Learning has been working with Sheffield Hallam University and the National Citizen Service to run a winter skills and residential programme looking at building the resilience of young people post pandemic. We found a low baseline and certainly more so in the young people from a disadvantaged background. But undertaking, targeted outdoor education, which is built upon the principles of identifying what you want to achieve – not just a generic programme – we found significant increases in their ability to adapt and their resilience. There was around 36 per cent increase in resilience and 23 per cent increase in wellbeing. We know that resilience and wellbeing are interconnected. And we also know that if you get these fundamental building blocks right that will lead to better academic outcomes. So you don’t concentrate so much, as we often do, on academic attainment, but on the building blocks to underpin that. If you invest in the process, you’ll get the outcome. Putting those experiences into place, even if it means that you set up a study group around the campfire, stay with you for a long time.”

How does it benefit disadvantaged young people particularly?

David Watts: “The majority of these young people have not really had the opportunity to do outdoor learning in one way or another. They come away on a three-day residential and experience new things. The idea is that there’s outcomes throughout the sessions and they’re learning and developing themselves. There’s a lot of young people that come away who have never even made their beds. They make their bed, they eat together, they’ll have to socially engage with new people – it’s not just about the outdoor adventure, it’s the whole process.

Then they get to do the activities. These are all about helping people communicate, teamwork, putting yourself in places that you wouldn’t have thought you could get to. It’s about being challenged by choice – you don’t have to get to the top of something or row the entire river, the point is that you make the effort to give it a go [outside] your comfort levels. It builds confidence.

They do this alongside youth workers who get to see the young people in a different environment, they get to know them more, they can engage with them in a different way. It’s developing the youth workers as well. Our instructors do the direct delivery but the pastoral care and immediate support is from the youth workers.”

What does your research tell us about how hard it is for young people to access outdoor learning experiences in the last few years?

JA: “We know from data gathered during the pandemic that disadvantaged young people, even when they had the same sort of accessibility to natural spaces, didn’t take it up and didn’t have the capability to do that. Access is not the be all and end all. How we actually facilitate these experiences is the important thing.

I’ve been involved in research with disadvantaged groups and accessing natural spaces. Sometimes it’s a very slow, methodical process, because they do get impacted in a negative way because they’re not used to it. You’ve got to optimize these experiences in terms of the needs and the capabilities of the young people accessing it. The answer to that is you bring nature to the young people, and you get them exposed to it around the school grounds in urban environments to adapted adventure. It gives them that sense of achievement in an environment that they’re probably not used to. For example, years ago, I worked in inner city areas, working with and running programmes for young people. Some of them had never seen wildlife at all, a cow or a sheep or a big green space.”

How have outdoor learning providers been affected by the pandemic and rising costs?

DW: “There are that some that took out loans that are struggling to pay those and one or two we’ve sadly lost along the way. Now the industry is coping with the cost-of-living crisis.

We’re a charity, we’re not here to make money. We have to cover our operating costs but that’s it. We try and keep our pricing as sensible as we can, but it’s tough. Young people sit at the heart of everything we do and we want as many of them as possible to have the opportunity. We’re very conscious that families can’t afford all these things. We have a bursary scheme to help young people who can’t always afford it.”

JA: “We recognise that in a cost-of-living crisis schools want – and providers require – evidence to substantiate the investment. As a business model, we’re incorporating a mission that everything that we do has an evidence base underpinning nature to it. My appointment is to head that up, and to look at impact and how it resonates within the environment and within the young people that are accessing it.

We were talking to school leaders recently, and they are very interested in the transferability [of benefits of outdoor learning] back into the classroom, and the evidence that they can then provide to Ofsted and others. So it’s not just providing a fun, adrenaline filled experience as important as that is, there’s also a educational outcome and process.”

What would you like to see a new government do to improve access to outdoor adventures for all young people?

JA: “This is on the agenda. The Get Us Out campaign by Outward Bound Trust talks about young people having a fundamental right to have a residential experience in their secondary education. I think that’s a basic need. We need to understand that outdoor learning is not an added extra but integral – and should be integrated into how we learn.

We’ve got neurodiversity everywhere; not everyone learns in a classroom very well. They have to think about different ways and means of learning. The outdoors is a perfect example of that. I’m sure the new government will be on it.”

AH: “I would love…more recognition about the role that this can play in children and young people’s lives. If we could just strengthen that…recognition that learning happens beyond as well as inside the classroom. All the guidance from government is about learning happening in [the classroom], so inspection is about [that]. But we know that part of the barriers is schools and teachers feeling that they have the choice where learning happens best. Even just by adding ‘beyond’ or ‘outside’ as well as learning ‘in’ that would be fantastic because it would unlock other things.”

Are you optimistic policy will change to better reflect learning outside the classroom?

AH: “We’re seeing more schools and academy trusts coming to us to help them embed this as a way of teaching so that their teachers feel empowered to take their learning beyond the classroom, because they recognise the benefits. They’re not being told to do it – it’s from the bottom up.

You start with schools as hubs, as anchors in their communities. It is a great way of reaching a lot of children, young people in a safe and supported way. It’s a way of supporting schools immediately in the short term because they need support, but also starting to bridge and create those links between all those different services that are really fragmented around children and young people.”