Education policy in England has generally been slow to recognise the potential benefits to children of learning in the natural environment (LINE). The Learning Outside the Classroom Manifesto (DfES, 2006), when combined with the policy document Excellence and Enjoyment (DfES, 2003), seemed to offer opportunities for schools to engage with LINE (Passy, 2012), but this freedom is often perceived to be outweighed by the school measurement system which focuses on narrow cognitive outcomes. These mixed messages mean that teachers can be reluctant to engage with the outdoors (Dillon and Dickie, 2012) and that opportunities for creative and innovative approaches to LINE (Passy et al, 2010; Waite, 2011) are often foregone.
Recently there have been grounds for hope that LINE will have stronger government support. One source is the Select Committee on Learning Outside the Classroom (CSFC, 2010), which recommended that the powerful school inspection body, Ofsted, should include learning outside the classroom provision in its inspection framework. A more recent example has come from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which has pledged to ‘remove barriers to learning outdoors and increase schools’ abilities to teach outdoors when they wish to do so’ (DEFRA, 2011, p.4). As part of this pledge, DEFRA, Natural England and English Heritage have funded a three-year project to engage greater numbers of schools in LINE.
The objective of this Natural Connections Project is to involve 200 primary, secondary and special schools, in areas of high multiple deprivation, in using LINE to deliver the curriculum. The central team will facilitate and oversee implementation of the project, which will be in five ‘hubs’ of 40 schools in the south-west of England. Each of these will have a ‘hub leader’ who, in turn, will recruit five ‘beacon’ schools. These have existing models of high-quality LINE practice and will lead the project within a small local cluster of schools. The overarching aim is to change the culture in the cluster schools towards one that embraces LINE as a means of delivering the curriculum; to encourage innovative curricular practice among teachers through continuing professional development (CPD) and brokering effective relationships between LINE practitioners and teachers. If successful, this model can be used in and/or adapted to a variety of international contexts.
Jeffrey (2006) argues that innovation comes from a new combination of known factors, or from introducing new factors into an existing situation, and we anticipate that the project’s model of devolved responsibility, in which schools and LINE providers will be working together to deliver the curriculum through LINE, will spark and create curricular innovation. In this paper we will focus on the implementation model in the first two operational hubs, exploring the structures and processes set up by the project that are aimed at enabling and supporting schools and LINE providers in this process. We will theorise our findings through Woods’ (1990, cit. Jeffrey, 2006) framework for creativity in schools: relevance, control, ownership and innovation.
