King's Hawford is a rural haven of a prep school – and getting outdoors whatever the weather is part and parcel of life here. For our latest View from the Top, head Tom Butt gets on his soapbox to talk about why it's so important to bring learning outside wherever possible, and talks about the benefits of doing so...
I would hazard a guess that many of our strongest and fondest memories as children are of moments outside. Playing in the garden, climbing trees, family bike rides and digging enormous hole-and-tunnel complexes on the beach, not to mention team sports in every weather condition possible all feature heavily in my childhood memory bank and will inevitably do so in my own children’s. Purely on a scientific level, we know that the hormone serotonin (released when outside and immersed in nature) plays a significant role in strengthening learning and memory so it seems a logical step that we make the most of every open-air learning opportunity possible for our children. Children only have one childhood and it is our job as parents and educators to make it as magical as it can be and I believe that the great outdoors should play a key role in that period of their lives.
It is indisputable that children learn things in the classroom, and the wonderfully creative teaching staff in all of our schools work tirelessly to engage them with everything from long division to the Saxons, and Ted Hughes to emulsification. An outdoor approach, especially if combined with moments of challenge, complements what children learn in the classroom with what they learn about themselves out of it. The intangibles of grit and resilience, which we so highly prize for our children and a sense of wonder and responsibility towards nature are the result if creativity can be embedded in an outdoor teaching and learning environment. The possibility to make cross-curricular links is ever-present. Investigating how a deciduous woodland habitat supports different organisms and discovering an escargatoire of snails leads perfectly into the teaching of the Fibonacci sequence or perhaps the more obvious combination of mindful creative writing and associated artwork.
This generation of children will develop a deeper understanding of environmental sustainability more than any who preceded them and we should facilitate that as schools, allowing them to explore, discover and make informed decisions about our impact on the world. This is not in order to raise a cohort of slogan-using placard-wavers but to echo the words and teachings of the great naturalist John James Audubon – ‘A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children’.