Every Child in England Should Have the Right to Learn Outside

This is the last of three posts on outdoor education this week, prompted by my conversation on Teachers' Talk Radio. Monday was about why it matters. Wednesday was about what it looks like in practice. Today is the bigger argument.

Whether a child gets meaningful outdoor education currently depends entirely on which school they attend. That's a lottery. And it shouldn't be.

I'm not making an argument for mandating Forest School in every primary school in the country. A school in inner-city Birmingham is going to deliver outdoor learning very differently to a village school in Surrey with extensive grounds. That's fine. It should be different. What I am arguing is that every child should have an entitlement to purposeful outdoor learning as part of their education. The experience, not the specific model.

The Evidence

The evidence is clear. Outdoor learning develops fine motor skills. It builds self-regulation and emotional resilience. It strengthens collaborative problem solving. It gives children a relationship with the natural world that matters more now than it ever has. These aren't peripheral outcomes. They feed directly into classroom readiness, particularly for the youngest children. The hand strength that comes from digging and planting supports pencil grip and handwriting. The self-regulation that comes from managed risk, from climbing a tree or balancing on a log, transfers into the ability to concentrate and persevere with a challenging task at a desk. The collaboration that emerges naturally from building a den together is exactly what we want to see in paired reading or group maths.

The Structural Barrier

So why isn't it universal?

I think the answer is partly structural and partly cultural. Structurally, the curriculum has become so tightly prescribed over the years that many headteachers don't feel they have permission to do anything beyond what's explicitly expected. Outdoor education becomes the thing you'd love to do if you had the time, rather than the thing you build your week around.

The curriculum review is done. The drafting of the new National Curriculum is underway, with first teaching set for 2028. It should be an opportunity to get this right. But I have concerns. Very few early years and Key Stage 1 specialists are involved in the drafting. If the people writing the curriculum for four, five, six and seven year olds aren't the people who actually teach four, five, six and seven year olds, we risk ending up with a framework that doesn't understand how young children learn. What we need is a curriculum that mandates the core foundational knowledge and skills, because the evidence base for that is strong and we shouldn't lose it, but then trusts school leaders to deliver in a way that works for their children and their context. If a school wants to teach science through a gardening curriculum, let them. If a school wants to develop fine motor skills through whittling rather than another worksheet, let them. The outcomes matter. The route to getting there should be the professional decision of the people who know the children.

I should say that it's easier for me to advocate for this as someone with twenty years of experience. Early in my career, if something landed from the local authority, I'd have just done it. You don't feel you have the permission to push back as a new headteacher. It took experience, and some mistakes, to realise that the best thing I can do is be the filter: to make a professional judgement about what's right for our children. Russell Hobby made this point recently at the Headteachers' conference, talking about the cyclical nature of curriculum change. His message was essentially: do what you think is right for your children. That takes courage, but it's the job.

The Cultural Barrier

The cultural barrier is perhaps harder to shift. There's still a perception in some quarters that outdoor education is a nice extra rather than serious learning. That it's "play" rather than "work." That the children who really need to catch up should be inside doing interventions, not outside getting muddy.

I'd challenge that head on. The children who benefit most from outdoor learning are often the ones who struggle most in formal settings. The child who is dysregulated in the classroom is frequently calm and focused outside. The child who can't access the curriculum at a desk might be the one who thrives when learning is physical, practical and real. Pulling those children away from outdoor education to do more of the thing that isn't working is not intervention. It's repetition.

What I Want to See

At Fetcham, outdoor learning isn't something we do despite our high expectations. It's part of how we meet them. Our children perform, garden, build, explore and learn outside every week. They also achieve strong outcomes across reading, writing and mathematics. Those two things are not in tension. They go hand in hand.

Mandate the what. Trust professionals with the how. Give every child the right to learn outside. That's the curriculum I want to see.