Looking to the Future of Outdoor Learning

The Eden Project Nursery

September 2020 will see the exciting opening of a joint venture between the Eden Project and the Atlantic Centre of Excellence Trust (ACE), who have come together to create and manage an innovative nature-inspired nursery school. The nursery, set to be part of the Sky ACE Academy Primary School, is an exciting initiative, aiming to provide local young children with a key first step to help them on their way to becoming globally and environmentally aware for the 21^st Century.

Nature will be central to everything at the nursery, with up to 60 children having the opportunity to spend around 80% of their time in an outdoor environment. This will be stimulating, safe, and constantly evolving, with plenty of activities to encourage learning through nature, caring for wildlife and animals, growing plants, gardening, and cooking. All of the activities will be specially chosen to cultivate the children’s personal, social, and emotional skills as well as setting them up to be lifelong lovers of learning!

To help develop their key citizenship skills, the children will also have a say in how their outdoor landscape is arranged – as it will be an ever-changing environment, bringing new opportunities for exploration with every change! The outdoor space will sit alongside a welcoming indoor base, which will be as self-sufficient and low impact as possible.

The nursery makes a perfect addition to the Eden Project as it will draw upon Eden’s rich expertise in using the outdoors to enable learning. The team behind the nursery are passionate believers in the benefits of outdoor learning on children’s health, happiness, wellbeing and development, and hope that these benefits will enable children attending the nursery to flourish.

Nature Schools

Another exciting venture comes from the Red Kite Academy Trust and The Wildlife Trusts, who are working together with the aim of setting up a new school in Warwickshire, which will have a strong focus on outdoor learning. The Red Kite Academy Trust is comprised of a group of people from across the Wildlife Trust movement who have spent the past two years exploring the potential of Nature Schools in Britain.

The Trust feel that Nature Schools could provide a fantastic way to combat the considerable evidence showing that people’s lives are increasingly drifting away from the natural world. They hope that through keeping the outdoors at the core of the curriculum, this will help to foster children’s understanding of wildlife, wild places, and natural processes, and teach them to value and respect the natural world. The Trust are also confident that the school could support the growing body of evidence that frequent experiences of the natural world, through playing and learning outdoors, brings health, wellbeing and personal development benefits to children.

The Trust is hoping to get started with the Nature Schools initiative through applying to the Department of Education to open a new school in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, through the Free School programme. Nuneaton was chosen as the first potential location for a school due to its need for new, good school places, combined with the local community enthusiasm for the Nature School plans. The Trust are hopeful that the school could open in 2022 or 2023.

The Nature School would follow England’s National Curriculum, putting its own twist on learning through exploring and interpreting every aspect of the curriculum through nature. Just like at the Eden Project nursery, the outdoor environment will be central to daily life at the Nature Schools, with at least some parts of every subject being taught outdoors.

The overarching aim of the Nature Schools will be to connect children’s lives with the natural world, and to bring them the many benefits of that connection to their personal development, educational attainment, health and wellbeing. The schools will bring wildlife, wild places, and the natural world into the lives of all of their pupils and staff every single day.