Scotland’s outdoor classroom: enriching learning by heading outside
In this episode we chat to Professor Greg Mannion from Stirling University and Dr Claire Ramjan, Lecturer in Initial Teacher Education at University of Glasgow, about the importance of outdoor learning.
Recently revealed in a report commissioned by NatureScot and other partners - provision of outdoor learning in Scotland’s schools and nurseries has increased for some, yet decreased for others – but why is this?
We discuss the potential reasons why, the recommendations made in the report to improve provision, as well as ways we can all encourage children in Scotland to learn more outdoors.
More Information
Report highlights need for school children to be more connected to nature
Young People - Learning Outdoors and Developing Skills - facts, activities and inspiration to help you bring Scotland’s nature and landscapes to life for learners.
Outdoor Learning Directory - a portal to services provided by Scottish organisations supporting outdoor learning.
Transcript
Kirstin:
Hi and welcome to Make Space for Nature from NatureScot, the podcast that celebrates Scotland's nature, landscapes and species. I'm Kirstin Guthrie and in each episode we'll help you learn more about our amazing natural world. In this episode Tim Hancox and I chat to Professor Greg Mannion from Stirling University and Dr Claire Ramjan, Lecturer in Initial Teacher Education at University of Glasgow, about the importance of outdoor learning.
Recently revealed in a report commissioned by NatureScot and other partners, provision of outdoor learning in Scotland's schools and nurseries has increased for some, yet decreased for others. But why is this? We discussed the potential reasons why, the recommendations made in the report to improve provision, as well as ways we can all encourage children in Scotland to learn more outdoors.
So, hi Greg and Claire, welcome to the Make Space for Nature podcast. Thanks so much for joining us today. I think we should start off by just - can you actually explain the benefits of outdoor learning and why is it so important, please? I'll maybe ask Greg first, please.
Greg:
Sure, Kirstin. Thanks for having us today. Yeah, outdoor learning as it's termed in Scotland, is really a wonderful part of our curriculum for excellence and it has a very long history. So if we go back almost to the time of John Dewey, learning by doing or taking a hands-on approach, or being place-based or place responsive, as we write about it, to going into local areas and having a really deep kind of sensory approach to learning, and also allowing people sometimes opportunities to take action in response to all kinds of problems that they might encounter. So in the current context of having a nature and a climate emergency on our doorsteps and noticing that biodiversity might be threatened and that habitats might be lost. Going outdoors provides us with better opportunities, both for young people and children, especially to encounter other species and to think about what needs they might have. At the same time, if we just go back to what the literature says, we know going outdoors does all sorts of other wonderful things for learning, making young people more self-reliant and improving their academic performance. And certainly if you ask young people what they remember about their schooling, they'll remember their outdoor learning events. So yeah, after COVID, I suppose we might also remember that people's physical health and their mental well-being is impacted by going into greenspace of all kinds. So the benefits are enormous and they're wide-ranging.
Kirstin:
Absolutely. And Claire, are you wanting to add anything to that?
Claire:
Yeah, absolutely. So it's my particular experience with secondary school pupils, and it's really in that particular sphere, thinking about making the classroom learning a real thing, taking pupils to see the evidence of biodiversity and how rivers form in landscapes. And it’s very much about learning in the actual world, and that's just so impactful and so meaningful for them.
Kirstin:
Absolutely. It's so important as you both say, and I'd like to think that most people are aware of the benefits. I know you've just explained them, but we all understand the importance of being in the outdoors, particularly for children and young people, but your research has found that learning outdoors isn't consistently offered. Can you explain some of the main findings? Has there been a change in the level of provision, Greg?
Greg:
Yeah, so our survey has been ongoing really. We've had three surveys: in 2006, 2014, and the last survey, which we're reporting on in more detail today, is 2022, which came in at the tail end of COVID, when COVID was still impacting to some extent, on schools and early year settings. So over those three snapshots, we've randomly sampled early year settings in schools, and we've asked them to tell us about everything that went outdoors. In early years, that included clay, and in schools, that included everything that wasn't physical education or gym class outside, and wasn't break time. So, it's also important to remember that we conducted those three surveys in the same months, in May and June, when the weather would be warmer, and that gives us perhaps an uplift of provision in May and June, but we're comparing like with like, in 2006, 2014, and 2022. So if I go quickly to the main findings, I think that there's a great headline piece of news here about the early years. So in early years, we provide a statistical measure for the percentage of the day spent outdoors by young people in early years settings in Scotland using this random sample approach. So about 23% was our finding in 2006, that went up in 2014 to 36% and the good news, headline news, is that 39% of the day was spent outdoors in May and June in 2022 in earlier settings in our 19 randomly sampled settings. That's really great news. Schools, on the other hand, are a different story. I wonder, Claire, would you like to just tell the story about the school's statistics on how we measured that?
Claire:
Yes, so in 2022, we moved for the first time onto an online kind of data collection. So, we asked the schools to record every outdoor activity that they took their children out and the children were involved in, that wasn't PE, that wasn't kind of free play. So in doing so, we asked them to tell us exactly, as close as they could, the amount of time that the children spent outdoors, how many of them there were and whereabouts in the school or outside the school grounds that they were able to take them. In doing that, we were then able to take an average of the number of children in the school, the amount of children that went outdoors, and the amount of time that they then spent outdoors. So, by that calculation, we were able to work out the average amount of minutes that pupils were able to be outdoors in an average week in the summer term. In 2006, it was around 19 minutes that the schools that were able to respond to us were able to be out for. For 2014, that went up considerably, and we were really encouraged by that at that particular stage, and that was about 30 minutes. By 2022, unfortunately, the picture has changed significantly and we'll talk a wee bit about why that is in a moment, but we are now down to about seven minutes per pupil per week. Now that's an average figure, and so it's not a real figure, there's no child that goes out for only seven minutes per week in their school day. And that's an average of the schools that responded that then told us the amount of time, so there are some schools that are out for significantly more than that. But this means that there are some schools who are out for much, much less than that as well. So that's really important to notice within that statistic.
Kirstin:
OK, and you did both mention this, but I think it's quite important to emphasize that these figures don't include gym or physical education. So seven minutes a week, it's not much at all. Presumably you can't really go far in seven minutes. I know it's an average, so is most of that time spent in the school grounds rather than taking kids out to, for instance, the local green spaces?
Claire:
Yeah, significantly so, absolutely. It's not a uniform seven minutes that they spend outdoors. It's not quite like that, but yes, the place that people spend the most amount of time is their school grounds. The amount of time that was spent further than that, so 87% of the time outdoors, was spent either in the school grounds or up to one kilometer from the school. So very much keeping within that local area, and really significantly. What we did notice in particular this year, however, was that visits to woodland had increased in proportion. So, of the slightly smaller amount of time people were going with of the school grounds, one of the places that they were going more was to woodlands, so local areas where they could access things like kind of forest schools type activities as well.
Tim:
And can we ask about secondary schools then? So, I can see from your data here, children from 12 to 17, that kind of age group, are the results positive for that group?
Claire:
Unfortunately not. No, the secondary schools are under significant pressure, ever since COVID, and the ability for them to even participate in the survey this year was just non-existent. So, we had some schools that were interested in getting involved, that had lots of conversations with us, but in the end, only two were able to actually provide us with data. So the challenges that secondaries are facing, both in terms of their workload, in terms of the exam pressures that they're facing, meant that even if they are able to take their pupils outdoors, we are not able to collect that information and really understand it. So, it's a real area that I'm particularly passionate about and would really like to spend some time finding out a little bit more about what's actually happening within secondary schools, and a little bit more about what we can do to make that picture a little bit better.
Tim:
Yeah, it's very worrying indeed. Greg, if I can come back to you, looking at primary schools again, can you tell us about what you think some of the reasons are for the decrease in learning time? Is it to do with too much work that they have to cram in, not enough time to get outside, or teachers not being given the time or the training to take children outside? What do you think some of the reasons might be?
Greg:
Yeah, so this has been well-researched over time. I suppose the research on the barriers to outdoor learning internationally focus on a wide range of factors that are pretty well documented. For example, people will want to take time to understand whether health and safety has been addressed if it's their first time going outside. So, novice outdoor educators or outdoor learning facilitators might be concerned about health and safety. We know that concern falls away as people get more involved in outdoor provision. But there will also be other factors, including whether a head teacher supports the teacher in going outside, whether there's a culture of outdoor provision in their establishment, whether they've got good school grounds that provides them with a wide array of opportunities to take learners outside, so there might be a nice place for doing mathematics, there might a woodland where they could be doing some kind of science, for example, or art. There could be a quiet area for seating. There might be a pond, which would be fantastic for biodiversity education and so on. So a really healthy and wide-ranging habitat array in school grounds will certainly impact. But then locally, if it's a simple walk, maybe one road crossing to get to the local park, that also encourages learners to go locally and to do things there. So there's a wide range of factors that this would impact, but for sure, you've mentioned professional learning and training, so that was one of our key questions in the survey. We know that that's been a big factor. Before we get into that, the wider pressure on teachers, though, needs to be acknowledged, and I think Claire noticed that in terms of secondary school, but in primary school, too, the pressure around attainment gap and addressing numeracy and literacy, which are seen as maybe core areas, traditional subjects, maybe, and this is our hunch from looking at our data over time, is that since the last survey in 2014, schools have been under quite a lot of pressure to perform in those areas. So, while there is a curricular justification, it's in the curriculum that learners should be entitled to an outdoor element, and learning for sustainability includes outdoors as well. So aside from just teaching any subject outdoors, be that English or Maths, learning for sustainability as an entitlement means that learners should be going outside to do that too. Leaving that aside, teachers may well feel in a given school that they're having to attend to numeracy and literacy and maybe not thinking about going outside to do that because of that pressure, depending on the school culture and like I say those other factors. In the mix, however, there is one factor that we've identified through our survey, which is professional learning, which leads, as you might expect, to higher levels of confidence. And we've got really good data on that this time.
Kirstin:
Yeah, I think as you say, it's trying to knuckle down into actual stories behind the research, isn't it? And actually trying to find the barriers as you say, and there are a lot of schools and teachers that are managing to get a lot more and achieve higher levels of learning outdoors. And Claire, what does the research tell us about teachers that are managing to take learning outdoors most often?
Claire:
So, from the data that we managed to collect this time round, one of the significant factors in terms of getting pupils outdoors for a significant amount of time is the size of the school. So in smaller schools, it is more possible to get the pupils outdoors for longer. So in this particular survey, we found that all of the schools that were offering more than ten minutes per week of outdoor provision, again, on average, so not as a rule, but these schools all had a roll of less than 100 pupils. So, In that school size we're starting to make some assumptions about what those schools might be like. So smaller schools very often tend to be in slightly more rural areas, which may mean that they then have more access to school grounds and a range of school grounds and a range of facilities within those school grounds. The smaller size also potentially means that access to the school grounds is easier, it's just less far to get through your school and get outdoors and it's just a slightly easier process. That is not to say that large schools can't do it. There are just significant challenges, but working with teachers and working with experienced outdoor professionals gives them the confidence and gives them the understanding of the different things that can happen in any school grounds in any urban, rural, suburban area. So, while we know that small schools do this really well, there are lots of lessons that we can learn from them and then apply them into those bigger schools for sure.
Tim:
And can I ask you both? If you were pitching why outdoor learning is important and why there should be an increase in that provision, what would you say for the benefits for both pupils and teachers themselves? I'll start with you first, Greg, but, but feel free to chip in, Claire.
Greg:
It's interesting when you said teachers there, because you could from a psychological point of view, or from a learning outcome point of view, or from an exam point of view, look at those benefits and some of those I mentioned earlier, but the research on teachers is really interesting. So when teachers themselves were asked what they thought the benefits were, they tend to say one or two things really significant, which is that it changes the relations between them and their learners. And I think if we push that relational aspect quite into the fore, we can begin to think about relations more widely, which are not learning outcomes for an individual child. It's a relationship building experience. So the teacher feels more at ease with the outdoor space, and the learners feel more at ease as well. And therefore the relationship between teacher and learner improves. But if we extend that into the place in which teaching outdoors happens, then we've also got that opportunity where learners will feel that they've got a better relationship with their local area or with environments in general, and I know NatureScot's mission would be generally for the public to understand and care for these places. So that relational aspect is absolutely critical if we're to think about learning for sustainability. The other aspect of that includes the humans as well as the non-human aspects of these environments. So if we think about schools and their local areas, having a relationship with local people, farmers and other landowners and other people who manage landscapes, getting into these outdoor places and understanding who owns them and what needs to happen for them to be improved is something that will more likely happen. So the relational aspects between pupils and teachers, or learners and teachers, or children and their carers and their parents, the communities, and the more than human aspects as we say in research terms. These include all of the other living and non-living entities that we find in places. So there would be, from my point of view in my research, I think that's a key aspect of what we find when we take this idea of place as being really critical to when we try to provide outdoor experiential learning.
Tim:
So it sounds like being in a natural space you found to be a lot more beneficial than simply being outside anywhere else or in the classroom. So not just outside but specifically in a natural area.
Greg:
That's a really interesting point and it came up in our last survey as well as this time. When we look at the contexts in which learning happens, some of them can be clearly delineated as greener than urban spaces and we asked teachers, in all of our surveys the last two times, to tell us whether they felt learners were more engaged or not when they took learners outside to teach a subject of the same kind, they compared them to maybe an indoor lesson on a similar topic, and the percentages are really up there in the 80s and into the 90s for taking learners outside generally. But when we look more closely at the data and we just look at the greener spaces, then that percentage gets pushed up a little notch further, so we get into the high 80s and the 90s. So going outside for sure increases engagement, and engagement and learning has to lead to better outcomes by default. And we can trust teachers to judge when learners are more engaged, and they're saying they are on the good side. But that green space effect pushes that engagement even further, which again, is a key thing for NatureScot and other providers to be thinking about as we go forward.
Kirstin:
So that's a really good point you make there, Greg, because even chatting to friends who are teachers and who perhaps work in urban schools with perhaps more concrete playgrounds and less green spaces as such, so the benefits of actually getting outdoors and learning outdoors even within these kind of spaces is beneficial and I understand it obviously that pushes up the greener it gets, but it's still a really positive effect.
Greg:
Yeah, and there's even surveys done on routes to school in a Spanish context I think it was where they looked at how green the environment was as learners walked to school and whether they had green spaces outside their windows when they were in their school grounds and simply not talking about whether people went outside or not, but just looking at those routes to school and using GIS mapping data. And allowing for areas of deprivation they were able to show that learners’ attainment levels were better in those greener spaces with greener routes to school. So there's a lot more to be done in research in these terms. But it's all pushing in the same direction and the signposts are clear.
Kirstin:
And what do you, what do you both think needs to be done to improve the situation and make it perhaps easier and more attractive for teachers, schools, and pupils to learn outdoors? Claire, I'll go to you first.
Claire:
There's many things and lots and lots of them are interconnected. I think funding and time are two of the biggest challenges and opportunities, and encompassed within that is professional development. So the ability for teachers to share their practice, to talk to other teachers who are a little bit more confident or a little bit more experienced in outdoor provision, and being able to share those experiences and talk about the challenges that they're going to face, the opportunities that they have within their school settings and their local areas and really to learn from each other in a really productive way. That has to take place over some time. That's not an hour of a chat or an afternoon of a visit to a national park. Both of those are part of it, but actually having those professional conversations, drawing on wider reading, drawing on the research literature, but actually then having the opportunity to try out those outdoor experiences, reflect, continue those professional conversations and repeat and repeat and repeat. We know that as professionals that's what we do. We try it, we see if it works, we reflect and we figure out how to do these things better. So, having the opportunity to do that, both in a really crammed curriculum, so having the curricular space to do that, but also having the support from the senior leadership team, the support from the parents to enable the teachers to have that space to really try out lots of different experiences and have those consistent professional conversations with each other would be really powerful.
Kirstin:
Greg, what are your recommendations?
Greg:
That's going to be the bottom line, isn't it? What do we take away from research like this? To build on what Claire said, we do absolutely know how teachers change their practice. We know that because around the world every government that has any nous will be trying to find out how best teachers change their practice, whether that's to improve the teaching of science or maths, and all of these things feed directly into how an economy grows and how a country becomes a better place to live for everybody. So we already know how teachers change their practice, and it is to do with what Claire said, which is to try things out and learn over a period of time. An afternoon of a training session simply won't cut it. And we know from this survey, when we ask teachers about their professional learning, how much time and effort it takes for teachers to get into this territory with confidence. And what they were saying was, you needed to get beyond six half-day sessions over a period of time, six to 10 outdoor learning, professional training or professional confidence building or professional learning events were what people had under their belts when their confidence levels got up into the eighties, nineties, and a hundred percent, where we're at is far below that. So we know in terms of learning for sustainability, that less than half of primary school teachers in our randomly sampled surveys, that's approximately over a hundred teachers, over a hundred randomly sampled primary school teachers. Over half of them are not confident to teach Learning for Sustainability at the moment. And that's a significant number. Maybe we're able to say something like 60 percent or a bit more of them were confident enough to teach outdoors. That's a good thing, two out of three of them. But they're not doing it that much. So there's still another third of the staff in this sample that we have that weren't confident to teach outdoors. And they have children in their classrooms. Early years, on the other hand, we know they've been encountering more professional learning. Their confidence levels were in the 70s for outdoor and in the 90s, or in the 70s for learning for sustainability and in the 90s for outdoor. So we know the impact of professional learning. So the takeaway has to be, okay, yes, we do need head teachers to support, yes, we need curricular justification and that those things should be in place by now. We do need more funding and larger schools will need extra help and schools in areas of deprivation will need especially more help. And we need to improve our brands and we need to do all of those other things. But without this professional learning element, particularly looking at that data from our survey in 2022, I think we're actually going to be in exactly the same place next year, or the year after, or the year after. Because that's the missing link, as far as I can see it just now.
Kirstin:
Okay, so there's an awful lot of work that needs to happen with various people on various levels to try and improve the picture here. But, you know, the research identified, obviously the people in organisations are helping to make changes, but it isn't just down to others. I mean, we can all help whether we are a parent, a teacher, or neither. We have friends that are teachers. We all have schools on our doorsteps. So what do you think our listeners can do to help? I'll go to you Claire first.
Claire:
So for those listeners that are parents of children in schools, be supportive. If your wee ones are getting the opportunity to go outdoors and you have the equipment available to help them to do that, wellies, waterproofs, sunscreen hats, the kit that goes with that. Be supportive and encourage the school to do so and support them with new equipment and things like that if you can, but really just to embrace it, to be really positive about it, to notice that it is something that can be really meaningful and really impactful, and really support the school to do that. There are lots of lovely initiatives which involve food growing with schools. And if you can support your school to do that with your children at home, with equipment and kits and knowledge. I know as a biology teacher, I was responsible for our school garden, but I'm not a horticulturist. I don't have that level of knowledge. And so actually tapping into our community allotments and our grandparents within our school community was so valuable, taught me so much and gave me so much confidence as a teacher that I could then take to the pupils as well. So, noticing the experiences within the experience and knowledge within your community and really helping the schools to tap into that and just being really excited and positive about it, for me would be the key.
Kirstin:
Greg, is there anything you would like to add to that as well?
Greg:
I suppose there are other players we haven't mentioned in the mix would be people at the higher level of policymaking who are working through a refresh of curriculum for excellence right now, we need to not lose sight of this aspect, in learning for sustainability, which is also receiving quite a lot of attention. But outdoor learning goes beyond learning for sustainability too, and I think it needs to be really attended to across the piece at the micro level, which feeds then into the next level down perhaps, which is local authorities. We need to say to them, what are you doing? And there are free CPD or teacher education courses, pre-service, all of our pre-service courses are beginning to do quite a lot more in this area, but we need to be. We need to knuckle down and make sure that's for everybody and all universities. But that's not going to change the system. What will change the system is quite a large number of CPD courses of various kinds that allow teachers to grow and develop over time. At a time of environmental concern, nature crisis, nature emergency, biodiversity loss, learning for sustainability isn't a nice extra. It's going to have to be core to how we address climate change and other things coming down the line. And our communities are facing these issues on a day-to-day basis. I don't think communities will thank us in 20 years time if we haven't been doing something in this territory around climate change education, biodiversity loss education and using the outdoors to address these topics seems like a very good place to begin.
Tim:
Brilliant. That was an excellent summary. Thank you, Greg. And thank you both to Claire and Greg for joining us today. I think we all know that natural loss and climate change are enormous issues that we're all dealing with, so getting Scotland's children outdoors more seems to be the clear message that that's what we need to do to help them learn to connect with nature, respect nature, take care of nature. We're all in this together. So the more time we can spend outdoors learning or just outdoors ourselves and our general lives, the better. Thank you so much.
Greg:
Thank you.
Claire:
Thank you.
Kirstin:
Thanks for listening. If you're enjoying Make Space for Nature, please follow it on your podcast and leave a review or rating. We'd also love you to tell more people about the series. For more ways to connect with and help protect Scotland's natural world, go to nature.scot.
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