Assessing challenges and opportunities for schools’ access to nature in England

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2021.127097Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Children’s declining contact with nature can be mitigated by school trips.

  • One factor limiting access is distance between schools and green spaces.

  • However, the majority of schools have access to nearby green spaces.

  • Access is also limited by social and cultural factors.

  • There is a need for multifaceted solutions to improve children’s access to nature.

Abstract

Regular access to natural environments has been shown to have beneficial effects on children’s health, development and academic attainment. This study assesses the current capacity for English primary schools to provide access to nature, and the opportunities and challenges of doing so. Using a mixed-methods approach combining questionnaires delivered at schools across England, semi-structured interviews with school staff, and GIS and cloud-based distance analysis between schools and nearby green spaces we found that children’s access to nature through trips to off-site locations is limited by several factors, including the cost of transport. Even when schools are within walking distance to green spaces or had access to such spaces on the school site, factors such as the pressure of delivering the National Curriculum and teachers’ lack of engagement with outdoor learning may limit opportunities to access nature. These findings suggest that urban planning initiatives to create more urban green spaces should be accompanied by measures to reduce the non-spatial limitations to access.

Introduction

There is a wide evidence base for the beneficial impacts of green spaces in supporting urban ecological and social systems, particularly in relation to health and wellbeing (Gascon et al., 2018; Yao et al., 2021). For children, there is evidence that regular access to natural environments has considerable beneficial effects on their health and development, particularly in reducing or coping with stress (Corraliza et al., 2017), improving mental health (McCormick, 2017), and providing opportunities for physical activity and exercise (Bikomeye et al., 2021; Matisziw et al., 2016). Outdoor learning, including fieldwork and outdoor educational visits, offers children opportunities to learn and develop skills that are valuable to their academic attainment (Kuo et al., 2019; Malone and Waite, 2016). Time spent outdoors is also linked to children’s cognitive and behavioural development and their ability to concentrate and self-discipline (Ardoin and Bowers, 2020; Scott et al., 2018; Wallner et al., 2018). Li and Sullivan (2016) found that views onto green landscapes from school windows significantly increase students’ attention restoration and recovery from stress, while Ulset et al. (2017) found a positive correlation between children’s attention and time spent outdoors in preschool.

The amount of time children spend in nature has decreased sharply in the last few decades (Hand et al., 2018; Rigolon, 2017; Soga and Gaston, 2016). A 2009 survey compared the use of natural spaces by children with adults’ perceptions of their use of natural spaces in childhood. It found that fewer than 10 % of children regularly played in wild places compared to 40 % of adults when they were young, and less than a quarter of children visited a local “patch of nature” compared to over half of the previous generation (Natural England, 2009). These figures represent a generational shift away from outdoor, nature-based recreation activities towards indoor, sedentary and screen-based activities (Soga and Gaston, 2016; Louv, 2005), a trend amplified by changes in societal and parental attitudes (Hand et al., 2018; Soga et al., 2018), urbanisation and loss of local green spaces (Colding et al., 2020; Cox et al., 2018). Children from low-income urban environments have especially limited access to nature (Bates et al., 2018). Research suggests that reduced opportunities for spending time in green spaces will have long term impacts on the quality of life of children, particularly in regards to their mental and physical health and wellbeing.

In the last decade, there has been an increasing focus on schools as facilitators of access to green spaces, for both teaching and play activities (e.g. Bates et al., 2018; Bikomeye et al., 2021; Harris, 2017; Tan and Atencio, 2016). Schools have three main options for providing direct experiences with nature within well-maintained sites that are relatively safe: (1) creating areas of natural environment within school grounds, (2) visiting nearby urban green spaces, or (3) taking children on school trips to nature reserves or similar sites away from the school site. These three categories vary primarily in terms of distance from the school, but can also vary in regards to the typical features and management style of the site. School-based and urban green spaces are often more manicured settings, while nature reserves are typically more unstructured and ‘wild’. There is limited research into how the characteristics of natural environments impact children’s development, but there is a growing body of evidence that increasing the amount of greenery in more managed environments provides benefits to children’s physical activity and socioemotional health (Bikomeye et al., 2021; Souter-Brown, 2015). Local green spaces are also beneficial in that they provide regular experiences of nature which have long-term impacts on health and development (Scott et al., 2018).

Providing first-hand experiences of natural environments has long been practiced within UK schools. Prior to the introduction of the National Curriculum in England and Wales in 1988, much science education for primary-school pupils involved trips to nearby natural environments to view and collect samples of nature. However, this type of fieldwork has decreased substantially, replaced by more prescriptive classroom-based investigations (Tilling, 2004; Lock, 2010). More recently, the UK Government has become more aware of the connections between access to nature and health and wellbeing, leading to high investment in schools and local parks between 2005 and 2007, and inclusion of school greening programmes within the Government’s 25-Year Plan to Improve the Environment (Her Majesty’s Government, 2018). Forest Schools are also growing in popularity in the UK following the model of Scandinavian countries (Smith et al., 2017). However, access to nature has not reached the level of more environmentally conscious countries such as Denmark, where over 10 % of preschools are located in forests or other natural settings (Stasiuk, 2016) and at least 28 % of schools undertake outdoor learning weekly or bi-weekly (Bentsen et al., 2010). Data is lacking on current levels of access to nature through UK primary schools, although Fisher (2001) found that, at Key Stage 3, 50 % of surveyed schools did not do any outdoor field science. This study will attempt to fill this gap in knowledge by assessing English schools’ current and potential provision of access to nature.

Section snippets

Methods

Studies have shown that researchers interested in access and use of nature spaces should integrate qualitative and quantitative methods to understand more fully the factors shaping use and access (Higgs et al., 2012; Ives et al., 2017). In designing this piece of research, we determined that neither quantitative nor qualitative methods alone would be sufficient to answer the research questions. We wanted to explore both quantitative and qualitative types of sub-questions, so chose to collect

Access to nature through school trips to natural environments

The number of school trips to off-site locations in the 2016/17 school year varied considerably between schools, but most schools (60.0 %) took five or fewer school trips over the year (Table 2). Of these trips, questionnaire responses suggest that most trips have a natural element as 72.1 % of trips gave children opportunities to experience direct or indirect contact with nature. More precisely, 29.0 % of trips were to sites whose main purpose is nature conservation and where pupils can

Discussion

Access to nature is important for children, for reasons of education, personal development, health and wellbeing. The results of this study suggest that school staff do not underestimate the importance of providing access to nature for their students; however, the opportunities for schools to provide this access are limited.

The majority of primary schools in England do provide children with opportunities to experience direct contact with nature through school trips to nature reserves, accessing

Conclusion

In conclusion, children’s access to nature through primary schools in England is partially limited by spatial factors, namely the distance between schools and natural environments. However, even when schools are in walkable proximity to natural environments (including parks and gardens) other factors, such as pressure of delivering the National Curriculum and teachers lack of engagement with outdoor learning, may limit the opportunities for student’s direct contact with nature. Thus, in order

Funding

This work was supported by the Durrell Institute of Conservation of Ecology (DICE) at the University of Kent.

Author statement

Elizabeth WALKER: Methodology; Investigation; Formal analysis; Writing – Original Draft; Writing – Review & Editing; Visualization.

Dimitrios BORMPOUDAKIS: Methodology; Software; Formal analysis; Writing – Review & Editing; Visualization.

Joseph TZANOPOULOS: Conceptualization; Methodology; Writing – Review & Editing; Supervision.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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