Have you heard of the udeskole (translated as “outdoor school”) movement, a Scandinavian concept that targets children aged 7-16? It is characterised by compulsory educational activities taking place in the local and natural environment around schools on a regular basis.

Apparently, there are now universities and colleges offering comprehensive programmes in udeskole pedagogy. It’s officially legit. And it’s got me dreaming.

Imagine every school having links to outdoor learning that they are expected to use across the curriculum at least fortnightly? Imagine all teachers having formalised training in delivering outdoor education? Imagine every subject specialist in primary and secondary school confidently learning how to make use of the resources in their local school field, park, nearby river and woodland to access the curriculum?

If we were to make that happen, imagine the possibilities:

• In food preparation and nutrition, growing your own food and then cooking and eating it or supplying the school kitchen.
• In design and technology, building, assembling and then studying the use of bird boxes.
• In mathematics, calculating the volume of trees or estimating inaccessible heights and lengths; looking at symmetry and shapes around the school; following and giving directions; measurements; identifying patterns in nature; data collection; maps and scale drawing.
• In geography, studying cloud formations, weather and the climate.
• In English, encouraging students to evoke a sense of place through creative writing that appeals to the senses, such as writing poems in and about nature.
• In media, getting students to use cameras and tripods to create a nature photomontage, a nature documentary or to film their videos in outdoor locations.
• In art, drawing or painting a landscape while you are there experiencing the environment.
• In drama, dance and music, taking the practice sessions and rehearsals outdoors can be liberating.
• In science, if you have a pond in your grounds, this is an ideal environment to study food chains and local biodiversity, investigating invertebrate species in the school pond using pond dipping, and carrying out identification and water quality testing. Outdoor spaces also allow for large-scale experiments, such as exploring forces. Going outside is also a great opportunity to teach about different forms of sustainable energy, such as wind power and solar power.
• For mental health and wellbeing interventions, the outdoors is invaluable, from team-building exercises, such as building a den and cooking a meal on an open fire, to exercises like teaching mindful walking, creating journey sticks and having 1:1 conversations in an outdoor, non-threatening setting.

It all seems too easy written down, but then you come crashing to Earth: this is not practical, right? And even if it was, a school leader would never actually let you do it.

Well, if you think like that, I challenge you to google or watch this two-minute video about the Green Bronx Machine. In it, founder Stephen Ritz talks about the creative and innovative way that he incorporated vertical gardens into the classroom, which resulted in creating remarkably positive outcomes in a Bronx school district that typically experiences low school attendance, high dropout rates and high levels of homelessness and drug use among students and their families (see bit.ly/greenBronxmachine).

There are plenty more case studies if you look for them.

And then there’s the research. I have been reading up a lot recently on England’s largest outdoor learning project. The Natural Connections Demonstration was a four-year initiative focused in the South West of England to help teachers and schoolchildren experience the benefits of the natural environment by empowering educators to use the outdoors to support everyday learning.

The research results were extremely encouraging, as more than 92 per cent of the pupils expressed a significantly higher level of wellbeing, improved social relations and joy while being taught in the outdoors, compared with classroom teaching; 85 per cent of the schools saw a positive impact on behaviour; and teaching outdoors also had a significant stress-reducing effect on teachers using the outdoor environment for their lessons, with 69 per cent saying it had a positive impact on their job satisfaction.

A line that really resonated with me, though, was that outdoor learning isn’t a subject or topic; it’s a way of teaching.

It’s not just this study. For example, the outdoor learning environment has been widely documented as playing an essential role in the development of children. Nature is important to children’s development in every major way - intellectually, emotionally, socially, spiritually and physically (Kellert, 2005). So why don’t we do it more?

We, as educators, need to move beyond our initial excuses about inclement weather, class control, risk assessments, lack of the right clothing or being an urban school, and raise the status of outdoor learning as a pedagogy, recognising its essential value in supporting the development of the whole child.

We need to acknowledge that outdoor learning takes place the minute you set foot outside of the constraints of the classroom walls. Inner urban schools all have a playground where there are opportunities to observe and interact with nature. For these schools, there may be a need to embrace the concept of naturalising our outdoor learning environments, which means bringing back trees, shrubs, perennial plants, vines and edible plants for children’s enjoyment and healthy development.

It will take regular CPD, too. We need to continue to build teachers’ confidence and motivation, encouraging a whole-school ethos that outdoor learning is not only permissible but encouraged. One of the reasons for the successful roll-out of the Natural Connections project was that each school established an outdoor learning team (including an outdoor learning lead, member of senior management, a governor, parent, teachers and other staff) to ensure that responsibility for outdoor learning was shared. This approach aimed to support a sustainable change in teaching practice across the school to ensure that activity continued beyond the project’s lifetime.

But most of all, this is about a perception change. Outdoor learning is about more than just getting a bit of fresh air.

Clare Erasmus is director of wellbeing at Brighton Hill Community School in Basingstoke

This article originally appeared in the XX MONTH 2019 issue under the headline “Oi, you - yes, you: outside, now!”