Should “all children in all schools in Wales” have the “guaranteed opportunity” of an outdoor residential experience? Sam Rowlands MS thinks so and is proposing that a law be introduced “to ensure that all children do have the opportunity of that great experience”.
Tomorrow, the Senedd will vote on his outdoor education bill - deciding if it should proceed to the next stage.
The Welsh government, however, has said ”the bill is unaffordable at this present time”.
The average yearly cost of introducing the entitlement has been put at between £15 million and £19 million.
Here’s what you need to know:
What exactly is being proposed?
The bill would place a legal duty on Welsh ministers to “take reasonable steps to ensure” that a course of residential outdoor education is provided once, free of charge for at least a week as part of the curriculum, to pupils in council-run schools.
The proposed law would also create a legal duty for Welsh ministers to provide funding to local authorities to enable them to do this.
Rowlands, proposing the bill, believes residentials “inspire children to be outdoors and provide an experience that lasts a lifetime” but “too many children miss out…for financial reasons”.
He says: “I think it’s incumbent on us to provide that guarantee to all children.”
Who might object?
The Welsh government does, and has said it does not support the bill for “very serious reasons...in three key areas: curriculum delivery, legislation, finance”.
Giving evidence to the Senedd Children, Young People and Education Committee in January, then education minister Jeremy Miles said he was “very enthusiastic” about outdoor learning and the potential that brings: it was “beyond doubt…a positive experience for young people”.
But he said the bill effectively made “residential outdoor education compulsory” and therefore undermined the local flexibility that was one of the key tenets of the new Curriculum for Wales.
However, his main concern was affordability, given “the pressures on school budgets, the pressures on the Welsh government’s budget and the very real pressure on council budgets”.
How much is the estimated cost?
The average yearly cost of the bill has been put at between £15 million and £19 million.
What do teachers and school leaders say?
There is a consensus that outdoor education is important - but Welsh teaching unions and school leaders’ organisations have raised concerns about affordability and also the timing of the bill.
Laura Doel, national secretary of the NAHT Cymru school leaders’ union, told the committee in January that “outdoor education is vital to the development of learners”, but she said education spending needed to be “prioritised to where school leaders and teachers think it will best benefit learners”.
She pointed out that £19 million - the upper end of the estimated cost of introducing the entitlement - is roughly 450 full-time teachers on the average wage for a teacher.
“We would actually say we would prefer that money to be spent on front-line teaching and learning,” she said.
Ms Doel also questioned the timing of the bill, when schools and teachers are “already under significant pressure with the delivery of the new curriculum, new [additional learning needs] legislation, new qualifications, to name just a few”.
The entitlement would be “an unnecessary and additional burden”.
Catherine Falcus, education and leadership policy officer at the Association of School and College Leaders Cymru, also questioned the timing, saying the entitlement would be “an additional pressure” at a time when schools were already under pressure.
Urtha Felda of the NASUWT teaching union welcomed “the focus on outdoor learning” introduced by the bill but said that “there are financial issues in the current climate”.
Is there any unequivocal support for the bill?
In written evidence to the committee, children’s commissioner for Wales Rocio Cifuentes described the “importance and necessity” of the entitlement to outdoor residential education.
She said there was a “large postcode lottery”, both in terms of whether or not schools offered these activities and whether or not they were “affordable to attend”.
The reality was that, without the entitlement, “many children” would not have these experiences.
