Nursery Management: Outdoors - Where children want to be

Does the outdoor environment matter? What is the role of leaders and managers in relation to outdoor provision? How can we ensure that our practice outdoors is as good as our practice indoors? How can we support staff to make better use of the outdoors? How can we make sure that our outdoor space is valued by parents, and meets the needs of our families? What does good outdoor practice look like, and how can we improve our own outdoor provision?

In my work with schools and settings across the UK, these are the questions that are often asked by leaders and managers. In this article I will set out to provide some answers, mindful of the value of the outdoor environment to young children's health, well-being, learning and development. I will examine the interrelated key elements of good practice, and offer tips and strategies for involving everyone in auditing and improving outdoor practice.

WHY DO WE NEED TO MAKE GOOD USE OF THE OUTDOORS?

It has long been recognised that the outdoor environment offers children experiences that are harder to provide in the same way indoors, as well as other experiences that are just not possible to offer indoors. However, in 2009 a report to Natural England said:

Children spend less time playing in natural places, such as woodlands, countryside and heaths; less than 10 per cent play in the natural places compared to 40 per cent of their parents and grandparents when they were young. (Childhood and Nature: a survey on changing relationships with nature across generations, p8)

Prior to this report, the EYFS also acknowledged this trend:

Despite this cultural shift away from outdoor play and learning, it remains essential to children's health, development and well-being. Consequently, it is vital that early years settings maximise children's opportunities to be outdoors: for some it may be their only opportunity to play freely and safely outside. ('Effective practice: Outdoor Learning', Early Years Foundation Stage, 2007)

So, what are children missing out on? What does the outdoor environment offer a child that is different to indoor experiences?

First, the outdoors is a dynamic environment where no two days are the same. Second, in the outdoor environment children have more freedom and space, improved chances for energetic activity and movement, new challenges and opportunities for managed risk-taking, sensory experiences, direct contact with the weather, seasons and natural world, all of which contribute to making the outdoors a unique and special place.

It is a curriculum expectation

Across the UK, all the early years frameworks and guidance documents place importance on children playing and learning outdoors. In Scotland, the Curriculum for Excellence notes: Well-constructed and well-planned outdoor learning helps develop the skills of enquiry, critical thinking and reflection necessary for our children and young people to meet the social, economic and environmental challenges of life in the 21st century. Outdoor learning connects children and young people with the natural world, with our built heritage and our culture and society, and encourages lifelong involvement and activity in Scotland's outdoors. (Curriculum for Excellence through outdoor learning, p7)

In England, the revised EYFS framework continues to place an emphasis on the importance of the outdoor environment. Providers must provide access to an outdoor play area or, if that is not possible, ensure that outdoor activities are planned and taken on a daily basis. (p24)

In Wales, the curriculum document states, 'The Foundation Phase environment should promote discovery and independence and a greater emphasis on using the outdoor environment as a resource for children's learning'. (p4)

In Northern Ireland, a guidance booklet for early years practitioners offers this rationale for using the outdoors: The outdoor area provides young children with one of the best possible environments in which to learn. Any adult who has watched children playing in a well planned and well resourced outdoor area with involved adults will have observed the joy and excitement they experience as they learn new skills and make fresh discoveries. (Learning Outdoors in the Early Years: A Resource Book, 2005)

Outdoors is where children want to be

Many outdoor enthusiasts assert that if babies, toddlers and young children are given unrestricted access to the outdoor environment, significant numbers of them choose to be outdoors rather than indoors. This assertion is perfectly illustrated by the following anecdote. In an Essex day nursery, staff in the baby room made a decision to offer free access to outdoors to all babies who were independently mobile. So whether they were crawlers, bottom shufflers or toddlers, if they wanted to be outdoors they could be. Several months later, the staff reported that since that decision was taken, most of their day was spent outdoors. The non-verbal babies were making their preferences very clear to staff!

WHAT ARE THE KEY ELEMENTS OF GOOD OUTDOOR PRACTICE?

Good outdoor practice has several elements and involves much more than a shed full of resources. The key elements of good practice are holistic and interrelated: workforce, environment, practice. Each aspect is of equal importance in securing high quality outdoor provision and practices in early years settings.

Furthermore, improvements to the use of outdoors require action from everyone in the setting across all three elements. Let's look at these three elements in more detail.

Workforce

Leaders and managers demonstrate that they value and promote outdoors through:

• being outdoors themselves in all weathers
• publicity and marketing materials
• job descriptions
• policies
• development plans
• budgets
• staff training days
• prospectus, noticeboards, displays and other information supplied to parents.

Practitioners are confident, knowledgeable, playful and enthusiastic about being outdoors. They:

• value the outdoor environment and understand the benefits for children
• have a positive attitude towards being outdoors
• dress appropriately for the weather conditions
• support risk-taking and assess risks to enable children's experiences rather than restrict them
• consider and include use of the outdoor environment when planning next steps for children's learning and development
• are attentive and engaged outdoors - playing alongside children and sensitively introducing new ideas, language and skills.

Environment

Practitioners create an enabling outdoor environment that:

• values children's interests, while planning further experiences that build on children's play ideas
• provides children with sufficient space to be with others or to be alone
• offers children challenging opportunities to be physically active
• has secure boundaries
• changes and evolves as children's play develops
• has a variety of levels and surfaces
• has places for shade and shelter
• has safe places to sit and watch the world go by
• is full of irresistible open-ended play materials
• gives children access to water for play and gardening.

Practice

The setting's organisation, deployment of staff, and daily routines take account of the value of outdoors and ensure that:

• children have extended time to play outdoors on a daily basis
• all children have independent access to outdoors
• children and adults have allweather protection, and there is spare clothing
• equipment is well organised
• there are child-friendly accessible storage facilities
• free-flow access and flexible deployment enables staff and children to move freely between indoors and outdoors
• children's opportunities to be outdoors are not overly restricted by care routines (such as snacks and meals, rest and sleep, toileting and nappy changes)
• the set up/tidy up routines outdoors are minimal, and involve both staff and the children.

HOW CAN WE IMPROVE OUR OUTDOOR PRACTICE?

Any changes in practice require time, energy, enthusiasm and commitment from everyone at the setting. Outdoor Matters advocates that settings follow a cyclical process, to manage changes, and to ensure that the improvements are successful and sustainable in the longer term.

This process of review, plan, do illustrates the approach to managing change used by Outdoor Matters.

Review

Before making any changes, it is important to evaluate existing practice. Using the bulleted lists above, review your current practice under the three headings: Workforce, Environment, Practice. Aim to agree what is working well and also to identify the areas for improvement.

To gather a truly representative viewpoint, involve as many people as you can in this audit, including children, parents, practitioners, and non-teaching staff such as caretakers, cleaners, office staff, and midday supervisors. There will be a range of valid perspectives within the team. For example, the cleaner may feel that the muddy footprints to the cloakroom are a negative aspect of the current use of outdoors, while the practitioners may see muddy trails as an inevitable consequence of successful free-flow.

Consider all the possible sources of evidence that could inform your decisions:

• Discussion with children, parents and colleagues
• Observation of the outdoor area in use
• Review of planning
• Review of children's records
• Review of displays and notice boards
• Scrutiny of information, policies and paperwork
• Review of resources and equipment storage.

Plan

Once you have a clear evaluation of the aspects that are working well, and those that need development, you can start to plan your next steps.

Think about who to involve in action planning. It is good practice to share the responsibility for planning improvements across the staff team and also to involve parents, children and non-teaching staff. This ensures that the planned changes are understood by all and makes maintaining the improvements in the longer term a more likely outcome.

Many settings have had success in creating a working group that meets regularly to focus on the development process. Begin by working out whether you have identified the need for improvements across all three elements, or just one or two. If there is a lot to do, you will need to prioritise and set realistic timescales. Try to work out whether there is an underlying concern that is limiting children's outdoor experiences, such as staff knowledge and confidence. Also try to identify some 'quick wins' - changes that are easy and quick to accomplish at regular intervals, and make everyone feel as though things are actually happening. 'Quick wins' such as sorting out the shed, creating a display of outdoor learning, or putting together a box of den-building resources will help to maintain morale and a sense of momentum while the bigger issues get sorted more slowly.

An action plan is a working document - it should not be created and then filed! It will need constant reviewing and amending as some actions are completed and further tasks are identified. Use it to record your actions, as well as timescales, responsibilities, funding requirements, and measures for knowing you have been successful.

Do

The next stage in the process is the implementation of your action plan. It is important to use people's skills and enthusiasms within the working party and across the whole setting. For example, one parent may be able to take on responsibility for fundraising and grant applications, while someone else may prefer to trawl car boot fairs for wellies.

Be realistic in your timescales and expect some setbacks. For example, if a setting decides to offer snacks outdoors as well as indoors, at first it is likely that all children will choose to have their snack outdoors the moment it is made available - and the ensuing chaos may cause practitioners to say 'we tried it and it didn't work'. It is usually worth persevering, since once children get used to being able to choose where and when to have their snack, they will relax and choose whatever suits them on a given day.

If staff members initially feel overwhelmed, remind them that new ways of doing things take time to become embedded, so it is to be expected that the early days of a new routine or significant change will feel chaotic while everyone adjusts. Suggest that any new initiatives are trialled for six weeks, then have a formal review at the end of this period to identify what worked and what needs tweaking. This review session by all those involved is a useful strategy to mark the end of one full cycle of the change process, and identify what needs to happen in the next cycle to continue the improvement of the outdoor space.

Gail Ryder Richardson is an outdoor trainer and consultant and runs Outdoor Matters.

Further information

Outdoor Matters is an early years training and consultancy service that promotes the importance of the outdoor environment to young children's play, learning and development. Visit www.outdoormatters.co.uk or email gail@outdoormatters.co.uk

Other organisations that can help:

• Learning through Landscapes, www.ltl.org.uk
• Play Learning Life, www.playlearninglife.co.uk

Nursery World is releasing two DVDs in October to support children's outdoor learning. Presented by Outdoor Matters' Gail Ryder Richardson and Play Learning's Julie Mountain, they will inform good practice for staff working with ages birth to three, and ages three to five. Both DVDs contain double discs and are priced £69.99.

CASE STUDY: LITTLE EXPLORERS A VIBRANT ENVIRONMENT

Little Explorers Day Nursery in Rochester has been open for six years. In that time the outdoor area has been developed from a 'blank canvas' to an enabling environment. The transformation has involved staff, children and families. It has included the imaginative use of free and found resources, as well as a successful bid for funding from Medway Early Years team to create a canopied area for shade and shelter in the garden.

The initial vision for the garden was to create a space full of interest and texture. This was achieved by introducing a range of levels and surfaces, such as gravel, bark, grass and paved slabs, and the clever use of planting, low level fencing, and venting pipes to create different spaces around the garden. Further interest was added at little cost by creative use of recycled objects, such as the fence flowers made from plastic bottles, the small tyres begged from a local go-kart track, and cable drums donated by a local builder.

Each year vegetables and fruits are grown from seed, planted and cared for, then cooked and eaten.

At Little Explorers it is recognised that the best outdoor spaces include ideas from everyone at the setting. The leadership and management team believe that, to meet the needs and interests of different children, and to ensure that the resources and spaces remain an inspiring catalyst for play, outdoor environments need to continually evolve. The team lead by example, taking an active role in the development and use of the garden.

They demonstrate their commitment to good quality outdoor play through publicity, marketing materials, policies, staff development, and finance. There is an annual budget for maintenance and replenishment of dispersed materials, such as bark and gravel.

Working with parents

The staff are quick to recognise children's interests and adapt the garden to support their play ideas. For example, the building site next door was originally screened off by a tarpaulin, but when staff realised that several children were peeping behind the tarpaulin and were fascinated by watching the builders at work, they decided to take action! The tarpaulin was removed to give children a clear view of the workmen and a building area was created in the garden so that children could act out what they had seen happening next door.

The staff also value the input from parents about the development of the outdoor space.

Parents dropping off their child by car enter the premises through the garden and this means they are familiar with the space as it changes throughout the seasons. Some parents have anxieties about their child having access to materials such as gravel, or are concerned about their child falling or tripping on uneven surfaces. The staff at Little Explorers take time to reassure worried parents, and explain the value of managed risk in children's lives. They also explain how they work with children to create a shared understanding of how to use materials to keep themselves and others safe. For example, gravel can be dug, mixed, scooped, poured, and transported, but not thrown or eaten.

This partnership approach has brought further benefits; since parents now recognise and value the opportunities their children have outdoors, they donate seedlings, and offer to volunteer or share their own skills. An old tree stump was carved by a parent to create a totem pole depicting the three wise monkeys.

The recognition that developments outdoors require commitment from the management team and practitioners, a well organised and attractive space, and daily practices and routines that facilitate children's access and use of outdoors has resulted in a vibrant environment that is valued by all. It is well used throughout the year, and offers enriched opportunities for children's play and development in all areas of learning.

References

Natural England, Childhood and Nature: a survey on changing relationships with nature across generations

Effective practice: Outdoor Learning. The Early Years Foundation Stage, 00012-2007CDO-EN 2007

Curriculum for Excellence through outdoor learning

Learning Outdoors in the Early Years: A Resource Book, ISBN 1 905093 79 9