Early years settings are expected to provide children under the age of three with regular, high-quality outdoor experiences. The current framework, Birth to Three Matters, promotes that expectation and the Early Years Foundation Stage, which will be statutory from September 2008, shares that expectation (see box).
The Government is also encouraging local authorities to review how settings ensure that children can access outdoor provision and to check that providers are aware of their responsibilities. Yet outdoor provision for babies and toddlers is an area of the curriculum that concerns many practitioners.
What does the outdoor environment offer babies and toddlers? What can they do outdoors? How can we keep babies and toddlers safe and healthy outdoors without restricting their natural impulse for exploration and investigation (see box)? These are just some of the issues raised by practitioners around the country when they turn to Learning through Landscapes for advice and information.
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