Outdoor Activities

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend, who in his time in your Lordships’ House has really championed the cause of outdoor access. It was a privilege to be able to work with him on the Countryside and Rights of Way Act, and ever since then I have learnt a great deal from him about all aspects of access. He referred to the different categories of people to whom access is important. I would classify myself in the category of nature lover, and it is on that that I am going to concentrate today.

In my lifetime, our lives have certainly become much more constrained to being indoors, in cars and in front of screens. It is a fact that has been reported widely that children play out less, are driven about more and spend more time in front of TVs and games consoles. My noble friend laid out some of the reasons why that is dangerous. It is dangerous to health and, as my noble friend was right to point out, particularly to mental health. It is extremely uplifting to spend time even just walking outdoors.

I feel pretty lucky, because we did not have a TV until I was 14 and my parents thought that their big radiogram was quite exciting enough. Being the last child by a long way and living in the middle of nowhere, I thought that damming the stream was high entertainment if my friends were not around. Now I realise how lucky I was, because the love of being outdoors has stayed firmly with me. At that age I absorbed absolutely effortlessly the names of birds, flowers and butterflies that my parents taught me. The excitement that they felt at seeing a patch of sundews or an early purple orchid if we were out walking in the mountains has also stayed with me.

Only once did I feel that my mother had taken this a little far. By that time I was an adult and she was staying with me. I was helping a neighbour with his beehives one evening in a rather nice area of heathland and my mother had come along for a walk. I made a mistake, did not smoke the bees enough and got 50 angry bees or more up my bee suit. I was running about screaming when my mother turned round and said, “Shh! I think I can hear a nightjar”.

Even with a very outdoor childhood like mine, I still felt keenly the absolute thrill of our biology A-level course field trip to a centre near Pickering. I remember clearly laying out our metre squares, our job being to count the different species within that metre. The point was to learn a bit more about ecology and how species related. My children in Somerset felt the same excitement when they went to the Somerset outdoor centres at Kilve Court and Charterhouse.

Imaginative schools can make the best of their own grounds. You do not need access to vast acres to make things interesting and exciting. Just this morning, as I thought about what I would say today, I looked at the Archbishop Sumner school opposite my flat in Lambeth, appreciating again just what they have achieved by planting silver birches in the front and creating an exciting woodland entrance to the school. At the back, there is an area now full of bluebells. There are also interesting places for the children to explore with woven living willow shelters and so on.

Experiencing the real world around you is incredibly important, not just for educational reasons but for the feelings of freedom and wonder that it engenders. The first time I came across a study on this sort of thing I was still a county councillor. In 1999, a publication called The Outdoor Classroom: Educational Use, Landscape Design and Management of School Grounds caught my eye. I started to look at the schools in our area, which had done a lot. That began to increase my interest in what you could achieve with even a marginal area round a school playing field.

A 2008 Ofsted report looked at a sample of schools providing opportunities to learn outside the classroom and found that, when implemented well, those opportunities,

“contributed significantly to raising standards and improving pupils’ personal, social and emotional development”.

Indeed, if you ask a child what they remember about their last term at school, you will often get a vivid account of a school trip or something else based outside the classroom.

What are the barriers to this? There is health and safety. The 2010 report by my noble friend Lord Young, Common Sense, Common Safety, helped to reduce the form filling and red tape that had previously hampered teachers who wanted to take their pupils on school trips. The Department for Education continued the effort to reduce barriers in 2012 with some important health and safety policy statements about school trips and learning activities. It did quite a bit of work tackling myths about health and safety by explaining that its main interest is in real risks arising from serious breaches of the law, such as a trip leader taking pupils canoeing but not ensuring that they all wore buoyancy equipment.

Then there are the costs. An important 2010 report from the other place, Transforming Education Outside the Classroom, found that there was a risk of school trips becoming the preserve of private schoolchildren. My noble friend Lord Greaves mentioned that going outdoors at all can be a preserve of the privileged.

Sadly, as the report was published just before the election, its recommendations have not been taken up as fully as they could have been. The Guardian newspaper ran a round table in 2012 that found, unsurprisingly, that local authorities have been hit by cuts from central government. It was an interesting round table under Chatham House rules, so the comments are reported but not attributed. It found that some schools thought that they could meet the costs from the pupil premium and others were no longer subsidising the cost of children going on trips or to local outdoor activity centres. One of the conclusions of the discussion was that if you viewed the outdoor classroom as a classroom, it could be an essential part of the curriculum and should be given equal status with the other aspects of provision.

Of course, one of the biggest champions of all that is the Council for Learning Outside the Classroom. If I had my way, the Government would class that body as pretty much as important as Ofsted. It is the national voice for learning outside the classroom. I can do no better than cite the example of Marnie Rose, who won the Learning Outside the Classroom award as the innovator of 2012 for setting up a social enterprise called The Garden Classroom four years previously to offer free science and nature workshops for schools in local parks and gardens here in London. She encapsulates what I am talking about when she said:

“When I was a child I attended Cann Hall Primary School in Leytonstone, east London and in year 5 & 6 we regularly visited Sun Trap Field Study Centre in Epping Forest. To this day I can remember the smells and colours of walking in Epping Forest, wearing wellies and being allowed to get wet and muddy ... seeing hedgehogs close up … and eating my egg mayonnaise sandwiches. They are some of my happiest childhood memories. The school continues to run the visits to this day”.

She then mentions that her nan had an allotment, which was also very important to her. It is that sort of childhood and formative experience that can lay the foundations of wishing to go outdoors and understanding what it can offer you as a person.

Given the time available, I will not list all the organisations that do so much work in this area, but I will just mention Garden Organic, which offers all sorts of help to schools with activities tied into the curriculum. The Wildlife Trusts run a huge programme of activities for children by collecting charitable and private resources. In 2012 alone, they hosted 162,000 pupils from 4,400 schools all over the country. They have sites dotted around everywhere, so there is nearly always one near a school. They provide informal education opportunities, with 140,000 members of their junior branch, Wildlife Watch. They also do outreach work in schools. There is a follow-up to that, because lots of those children then become volunteers with their local wildlife trust. You can go out to see things with experts. As I know, it is very hard to go out on your own and work out which sort of bat is which, but if you go out with a bat expert you will soon learn.

We talk about social mobility and equality of opportunity, but I think that is meaningful only if our young people have the chance to experience and learn about the natural world around them. To the Government, I say: encourage empty classroom day. This year, it is on 5 July, and I wish it all the luck in the world.