Without Walls: A Discussion on the Place of Learning Outdoors in Primary Schools in England.

Learning outdoors in primary schools has gained traction over recent years in England, stemming from the Learning Outside the Classroom Manifesto (DFE/LOTC 2006) which emerged as a result of the introduction of a variety of outdoor learning philosophies and practice such as Forest Schools, which has developed steadily across England since its introduction to English schools in Somerset in the late 1980s (Knight, 2011). Recent research has highlighted the wealth of benefits that both pupils and teachers gain from regular learning activities in the natural environment (Waite, S., Passy, R., Gilchrist, M., Hunt, A. & Blackwell, I. 2016) and yet despite this complementary research reported that only 8 percent of children (aged 6-15) in England visited the natural environment with their schools in an average month during 2013-2015’ (Cutler, M. 2016). This chapter reviews outdoor learning praxis in a small range of countries to argue for a re-examination of the place of outdoor learning in England today. It argues that within a society that has developed through environmental injustice outdoor learning needs to develop with a balance between learning and the personal experience on one side and an ‘eco-relationship’ (Henderson, quoted in Henderson and Vikander, 2007) based on environmental respect on the other. For this revisionist move to be successful the idea that learning outdoors is an addition to a curriculum needs to be challenged. Learning outdoors needs to become ordinary for its true value to be realised.