There is a bee in your classroom. And a bee in a classroom is like a bubble machine among a group of three-year-olds: it’s a chaos catalyst.

So you shout over at Samuel and ask him to open the window, quick. But Samuel just looks at you like you swallowed the bee and he does not move.

Oh yes, that’s right: you don’t have any windows. Because you are teaching in a tent.

Pole position

Why would you be teaching in a tent?

Well, because socially distanced schooling is extremely space-consuming and it minimises the number of children you can have in school. But what if there was a pop-up solution to this issue that suddenly handed you the gift of more classroom space?

You guessed it: this is where the tent comes in.

Canvassing opinion

Architect firm Curl La Tourelle has proposed a series of pop-up, tent-like structures that schools can erect in their playground spaces - or near-by parks, football pitches of other open public spaces - as an outdoor education solution for the current crisis.

“In contemplating with our children on how schools might return to normal after the lockdown, my partner Marianne Christiansen inspired me to consider outdoor learning, something that schools in Denmark have already adopted for their classes using tent-like structures,” explains Wayne Head, Director at the firm.

“Our education design team then carried out a series of studies and came up with the idea of transferring a proportion of teaching provision into temporary structures, using large-scale tents typically seen at festivals.”

Marquee points to consider

The idea is not that schools buy the tents. Rather, Head proposes reusing resources such as marquees and portable bathroom facilities from outdoor festivals that would otherwise be dormant during the current pandemic.

He has even thought about power sources, lest you are already worrying about where you will plug in your visualiser: where appropriate, the firm states, renewable energy sources can also be provided on site in the form of PV arrays and solar evacuated tubes for hot water heating.

So what do you think? Are you ready to pitch up in your local park to deliver geography in a tent?

Just close the door behind you, you don’t want any bees getting in…