Nursery World - Practitioners need help with nature

Teachers and early years practitioners need sustained training programmes to understand the importance of children engaging with the natural world, according to school grounds charity Learning through Landscapes.

LTL senior early years advisor Jacky Brewer said, 'With all the pressure to sanitise our environment, it is no wonder we have lost sense of the importance of engaging with the natural world, bugs and all. When I do training in early years settings, particularly about children under three, I often have to say "nobody died from eating an earthworm".'

Unless practitioners had grown up in a rural area, those under 30 often had little or no experience themselves of the importance of outdoors for development.

Her comments follow remarks in an interview with Horticulture Week by the Natural History Museum's Dr Mark Spencer, who claimed that primary teachers would struggle if natural history was on the national curriculum.

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