Although wellbeing is a complex term, it can be understood as a social model of health which places individual experience within social contexts, emphasizing the promotion of health rather than causes of illness (Atkinson et al., 2012). Critically, 18% of children and young people in England suffer a severe mental health illness (NHS, 2022), and yet 70% of those who experience mental health problems have not received appropriate support at a sufficiently early age (DfE, 2018). To combat this, schools are increasingly expected to support mental health and wellbeing, but receive few resources to do so. As such, there is a need for establishing mechanisms for supporting the health and wellbeing of children and young people which are relatively easy embedded within the school day, as well as using limited financial resource, to ensure sustainability.

Substantial benefits for wellbeing may be derived from contact with nature (WHO, 2016), and schools that promote children’s engagement with nature have reported children have fewer social, emotional, and behavioural difficulties and higher academic engagement and achievements (Browning and Rigolon, 2019). Despite this, six in ten children reported to have spent less time outdoors since the start of coronavirus and the initial lockdown (Natural England, 2020) and opportunities for outdoor learning in school are diminishing due to staff confidence in outdoor teaching and high demands in delivering the curriculum (Plymouth University, 2016).  Although providing good quality greenspace within communities may begin to address this, undertaking activities outdoors which support children developing an affective relationship with nature can bring benefits for health and wellbeing ‘over and above’ those expected from visiting nature alone. One approach to addressing this is through arts and creative practice within nature.

There is a growing consensus around the importance of arts for children in schools, with evidence suggesting that arts education can aid physical, cognitive, social and emotional development, as well as improving both mental health and social inclusion (Durham Commission on Creativity and Education, 2019). Muhr (2020) argues that arts-based activities offer a powerful way for people to connect to nature because they evoke an embodied response that fosters an emotional connection. In a systematic review, Moula, Palmer and Walshe (2022) synthesised existing evidence concerning the interconnectedness between arts and nature, and their impact on the health and wellbeing of children and young people. The review suggested that engagement with arts in nature was found to increase nature connectivity with nature explicit, thereby increasing children’s broader wellbeing. However, despite the evidence as to the benefits of arts-in-nature practice for both children’s wellbeing and their nature-connectedness, it is important to consider their reach and sustainability. Such programmes are often stand alone or require significant funding for long-term engagement of external creative practitioners and organisations. There is a need for greater sustainability with implications for how creative practitioners delivering arts-in-nature practice engage and work with primary schools and how the practice is embedded in the school culture and ethos. Accordingly, this paper reports on the findings from a survey of creative practitioners delivering arts-in-nature practice with children to explore the following research questions:

RQ1: What are the perceived impacts of the arts-in-nature practice undertaken by organisations?

RQ2: In what ways do organisationswork with volunteers, teachers, and schools to make their arts-in-nature practice more sustainable?

RQ3: What are barriers to greater reach and sustainability for organisations and practitioners in delivering arts-in-nature practice for children in schools?

This is part of a wider Branching Out project to establish how successful elements from an established mental health arts-in-nature programme can be scaled up from small, school-based approaches to whole school communities.

This article reports on one aspect of an exploratory multi-level mixed methods approach (Creswell et al., 2011). The overall study explored how adults in the wider community can be activated as volunteers to support the practice and thus build capacity for wider implementation. To address the study questions, the research comprised two work streams: the first (reported in this paper) was a survey of national arts organisations to identify arts organisations who have or who are currently providing arts and/or nature-based activities in schools either as part of the curriculum or as extra-curricular activity. Such organisations would be required to support the wider implementation of the Branching Out model described above. The survey comprises a series of open and closed questions which map the types of programmes the arts organisations deliver or have delivered in the past and includes questions on the aims and mission of each organisation, and sustainability issues. Specific questions for the national arts organisation survey were developed following the interviews with the teachers and artists and the survey was piloted on members of the partner organisation for face and content validity prior to dissemination. A further aim of the survey was to gather contact details of interested organisation and thus develop a national network of organisations providing arts and/or nature-based activities for children and young people, to enable future partnerships, to register interest in future involvement in the Community Artscapers project, and for dissemination purposes. There was an open call survey; we were not trying to achieve a representative sample but rather to access as many organisations or individual practitioners combining arts and nature in their practice with children and/or in schools in the UK. The majority of data collected was qualitative, but responses were generally short and concise and content analysis informed by Bowling (2014) was conducted in order to code and categorise this data. The survey questions served as an a priori thematic framework around the characteristics of arts-in-nature activities delivered; the aims and impacts of activities; working with volunteers, teachers, and schools; and barriers to greater reach and sustainability. Codes were identified under each theme to identify patterns within the data. Importantly, the frequency of a concept does not necessarily signify its importance (Bowling, 2014) and therefore analysis involved critical reflection on the meaning within the context of responses.

The final number of completed responses comprised of 47 organisations providing arts and/or nature-based activities for children and communities across the UK. For all, the combination of arts and nature was significant in providing a mechanism through which to connect children, young people and their families to nature, empower them to have a positive impact on their local environment, and support their mental health and wellbeing. While most of the activities were delivered by artists, there was involvement from both teachers and volunteers. Although engagement by teachers was a preferred model of practice as it opened up opportunities for a more collaborative and sustainable way of working between organisations and schools, it was identified as being challenging to facilitate because of a lack of pedagogical expertise on the part of teachers, and limited resource and opportunity to support their training. This was often underpinned by a lack of support by senior leadership within schools, exacerbated by a policy context of a crowded curriculum and accountability regime based on pupil achievement in a narrow range of subjects, and a lack of understanding as to how arts-in-nature practice might contribute improved educational standards, as well as more broadly to children’s mental health and wellbeing, environmental and sustainability education. Recommendations for future policy or practice are: providing access to more and better professional development around the process of arts-in-nature practice provided for teachers; using community volunteers as a mechanism for adding capacity and supporting sustainability of impact for arts-in-nature practice; and paying greater attention to multi-agency level working where professionals work together to create more coordinated approaches to embedding arts-in-nature practice in schools and communities. Together, these have the potential to create more sustainable and impactful practice for the benefit of children and young people and the communities within which they live.

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