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  BBC 10 Dec 06
Taking a walk on the wild side
By Hannah Goff Education reporter, BBC News

Come rain or shine, once a fortnight, children at Warren Park Primary School take a walk on the wild side. They don their mackintoshes and Wellingtons and head for what's become known as the outdoor classroom in the grounds of the school near Havant, Hampshire.

This is not just a clever clogs term for lessons "out of doors" - the youngsters are physically learning in a purpose-built classroom about what they find on the school's site.

"We started from quite a wide angle," says outdoor classroom teacher Les Terry at the school, which is in the heart of one of Europe's biggest housing estates. "We just started exploring what was out there. Taking it really easy and not getting involved in the heavy educational stuff.

"But now in our second year we are focusing on things more closely like lichen and insects."

Gradually the children, most of whom live in the most deprived ward in south-eastern England, began to feel an ownership of the site, says Mr Terry. They gave names to different parts of the site like mushroom wood for the area where fungi was discovered and deer park for the place where two regulars come to visit.

Paper work

The wonderful thing about this sort of learning is that every child can succeed, says Mr Terry. "They all seem to have happy smiling faces when we are out there doing it.

"It's a totally multi-sensory experience. They have to use all their senses to touch, listen and see things."

The outdoor lessons began when teachers told the head teacher they needed to use the classrooms to catch up on their paper work.

Head teacher Colin Harris said: "Here was an opportunity to get the children outside the class and see things that are totally different."

Currently the outdoor classroom is not much more than a cabin, provided by Hampshire County Council temporarily for three years. But thanks to a successful bid for regeneration cash from the Area Investment Fund, the school is soon to see a fully sustainable state of the art new £500,000 classroom. It will have a wind turbine, solar panels, solar-power lighting pipes and water heated underground, says Mr Harris.

"In this building there is going to be all these environmentally friendly things and at the same time we are teaching the children all about conservation and the natural world." This, he hopes, will demonstrate very clearly to the children why it is so important to safeguard the natural world.

"We keep telling people about climate change but we need to physically teach them about climate change."

And Mr Harris says the rewards reaped from this outdoor classroom have been incredible. "We used to be one of the most vandalised sites, now we are one of the least vandalised because instead of putting fences up and keeping people out, we let people in."

Another thing Mr Harris says stands out about Warren Park is despite the deprived nature of the area it serves, the school has not excluded a pupil in nine years. "Instead we work with the children," says Mr Harris.

And what the pupils explore outside, they are encouraged to explore inside on the school's website. Mr Terry, who built the site, explained how the virtual world of the web and the real outdoors feed into each other.

The website has become an educational tool in the same way that the outdoor classroom is itself, he says. It features outdoor classroom activities such as snail races and a blind man's rope trail in which blindfolded pupils have to feel their way around a roped pen.

"We are not trying to say the web stuff can replace the outdoors. We are trying to encourage people to get out there."

Mr Harris says it was his strong desire to teach children about the importance of conservation that prompted his walk on the wild side.

He says: "I don't understand how we are going to get people to love the environment and care about global warming without giving them a love of the world.

"If someone's a great lover of something, be it jazz or walking or whatever, it usually comes from their parents. "But what happens if their parents for whatever reason, are not providing that?"

Perhaps that's where the outdoor classroom comes in.
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