Introduction

Outdoor education and outdoor play and learning has a long-standing heritage. Based on a desire to engage learners experientially through structured and unstructured activities, and via reflection on “learning by doing” (Dewey, 1915, p255). Distinctively, the affordances of the outdoor environment are seen to enhance opportunities for learning in ways that are interdisciplinary, authentically felt, ‘hands-on’, ‘place-based’ and connected to local contexts (Beames and Brown, 2016; Lloyd, Truong and Gray, 2018). Of late, concerns around young people’s wellbeing, and the need for an educational response to issues around sustainability, climate change and biodiversity loss, have led to renewed emphasis on provision for outdoor learning. However, internationally, little is known about the durations and locations of this provision, how prepared teachers are to facilitate these, and how countries compare in this regard.

Few countries worldwide have much in the way of empirical evidence of the extent of provision of education in outdoor settings at school and pre-school levels. Exceptions include Canada (see Asfeldt et al. 2020), Hungary (Fuz 2018), England (Prince, 2019). In New Zealand, Hill et al (2020) (basing some of their protocols on the survey reported upon herein) revealed ‘education outside the classroom’ was mostly teacher led and focused on curricular enhancement. In Denmark, for example, Barfod et al. (2021) looked back at multiple surveys in Denmark wherein school leaders reported on outdoor schooling across three time points (2007, 2014, 2019) helping them discern the regularity of grassroots udeskole provision.. In Scotland, Beames and Polack (2019) reviewed inspection reports (2011 – 2018) to show that outdoor learning in ‘grounds, local green space or local community during school hours’ appeared in ¾ of primary schools’ inspections providing another way to capture evidence of the extent of provision. Internationally, each survey team have sought to capture evidence on curricular-linked outdoor learning using approaches that mostly differ. These differences make international comparison difficult.

This paper will describe research which empirically measured outdoor provision in Scotland and in Rimini, Italy using the same methodological approach. This enables international comparisons to be made and sharing of practice across the two countries.

Findings

The evidence presented here indicates there is value and need for an approach to surveying outdoor educational provision in a national and international context. The Scottish survey data provide a valuable, evidence-based measure of provision that counters popular opinion and others’ assessment of prevalence of outdoor learning provision in Scotland. Firstly, post-Covid, over half of the teachers in our survey held the perception that provision outdoors had increasedcompared to pre-pandemic levels. This of course might have been true, adding weight to the possibility of a sustained decline between 2014 and 2022. Secondly, the survey findings also counter the perspective offered by the HMIE report (HMIE, 2022) for the same year which suggested outdoor provision was an increasing feature, and that the pandemic had ‘accelerated the breadth and depth of provision’ (though for their exemplification cases this may have been true).  Our survey showed the early years sector did increase provision but our this did not hold true on average for most of our randomly sampled schools. The Italian survey data found that the impact of the pandemic had an even greater perceived impact on outdoor provision, with ¾ of practitioners across Kindergarten and Primary school settings identifying an increase. The ability to compare educators’ perceptions with the reality of provision, across settings and indeed across countries going forward, is an important step in understanding the motivators towards increased outdoor provision.

We report here on a repeated cross-sectional survey to understand changes in outdoor teaching learning and play in Scotland. Our cross-sectional survey approach is internationally distinctive in that it required settings to provide records for location, duration, focus, curriculum area, amongst other aspects. The design of the research is based on the view that practitioners or teachers are well placed to self-report, event-by-event, on formal outdoor provisions. In our survey, for each school/early years setting, a practitioner-researcher was supported with workshops, training and contact points to ensure accurate data were captured. A final methodology evaluation provided an opportunity for staff to report and reflect on data quality. Unlike once-off surveys of teacher opinion, we took the same event-by-event approach over the three surveys: eight weeks for schools and two weeks for early years settings. The three surveys allow us to evidence changes over nearly two decades across a range of measures including duration (minutes per child per week), cost, location, and curricular focus providing a comprehensive view perhaps unparalleled in other jurisdictions. In 2022, this survey was repeated in the Rimini region of Italy. Extensive discussions took place to ensure the methodology was accurately replicated in the Italian context, and that the terminology was translated in a manner that was robust and meaningful across both contexts. In Scotland, 108 educators provided data. These represented 19 early Years settings and 34 primary schools. The participants provided information about 205 outdoor learning sessions across these settings. In Italy, 59 educators provided information about 126 outdoor learning sessions across Kindergarten and Primary school settings.

In the Scottish context, there are many factors that might be influential in the diverging trends seen in the two educational sectors, Primary schooling and Early Years provision. Certainly, in early years settings, free choice play is seen as integral whereas in primary settings, learning is more planned and structured with a teacher leading learning. Comparisons with the Italian experiences suggest that this picture is similar across the two countries, with Kindergarten children spending slightly more time outdoor than Primary school children across the study period. Understanding the educational context across the two countries will help us to understand why this might be the case. Our contribution has enabled us to compare provision across time-periods in the national context, and also to tentatively compare with some other international contexts. However, the quality of this international comparability depends heavily on the approach taken in each local survey. Comparing provision internationally is important but challenging since researchers looking at features such as duration or location will take country-specific or strategically diverse approaches in culturally different contexts. Comparisons are also challenging going forward since research teams seek to re-use past survey approaches in an effort to look at change over time. Differences in survey methodology and sampling, for example, will enable or restrict accurate comparisons. Jucker (2022) (summarising Fiennes et al 2015) highlights that there is not currently a comprehensive survey of outdoor learning provision across all the nations of the UK. However, future surveys for better international comparison could easily build on the approach described herein alongside recent efforts to harmonise understanding such as PLaTO (Lee et al, 2022). As Jucker (2022) suggests “Only with a decent set of baseline data can the sector, funders or government agencies trace (positive or negative) developments” (idib. pg. 129).

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