Should nurseries and primary schools move outside to halt the spread of Covid?

[Iwantalonglie]

Some individual nurseries have been massively increasing the amount of time their children spend outside to reduce the Covid risk to staff and children.

I'm curious as to what people think of this. Should more nurseries move outside entirely? It might be difficult for secondary schools, but should primary schools try to move some classes into the playground to allow more social distancing in the school building? Or would this be impractical for most nurseries/schools?

@Fedup21. I completely agree with you. There are some primary schools opening which are intending to run on forest school principles. But they're mostly private with parents who have bought into the idea of outdoor education. It will be interesting to see what the outcomes are like for the children/ read Ofsted reports when available.

I actually agree with you OP. I’ve used to teach in a nursery where outdoor all day every day was the norm. In the part of London where I trained this was really popular and there were huge waiting lists for these nurseries. The children did everything outside, apart from eating which we came in for. With appropriate clothing I don’t think weather is an issue!

If the teachers organised the making dens and playing in the mud kitchen so it covered the learning objectives for the day?

Ok, so that's one day. Maybe two. What else are they going to do outside?

@Iwantalonglie

I agree conventional lessons wouldn't work outside - so it might make sense to have a mix of indoor/outdoor lessons.

Why is cold necessarily a barrier? If children are dressed warmly and properly and the lesson plan structured so they keep moving?

I presume you're not a teacher op? I work in early years in a state primary school. We do a huge amount of our learning outside but your suggestion is massively impractical. You also presume that all children will come to school appropriately dressed to be outside in freezing temperatures all day?

Also a huge part of our curriculum centres around literacy, children in F2 and year 1 are learning to write, doing daily phonics groups, 1-1 reading with support staff.
None of this would work outside and is a huge part of each day, as well as crucial for their education.

@BernadetteRostankowskiWolowitz. Organise outdoor activities for each day that encourage the children to be active and cover elements of the curriculum?

iwant just out of interested how long to spend outside in all weathers?
We're an outdoor family. Over the last fortnight we've been out for an average of five hours a day (we have decent outdoor clothing) and I can assure you that even the best 'fully waterproof' clothing is not fully waterproof! It's one thing to go out for a decent walk knowing at the end there is the reward of tea and cake(!) and a warm fire which you can strip off in front of and put on warm dry clothing, quite another knowing you will be sitting wet through and getting cold!
Nothing to do with mindset everything to do with being practical! I suggest you spend this week in your garden or outside space for 6.5 hrs without a change of clothes and then come back and tell us how you get on😁

Q1) yes, good idea
Q2) no, can't make it happen

It's a great idea when it involves mud kitchens and dens. Can you suggest how 30 children can learn long multiplication or graphs outside, or how to use semi colons, or in depth book analysis.

[quote Iwantalonglie]@BernadetteRostankowskiWolowitz. Organise outdoor activities for each day that encourage the children to be active and cover elements of the curriculum?[/quote]
Such as?

I should correct that you can get fully waterproof clothing, but it's not breathable so if you get sweaty you still get wet😂...it's also much colder to wear, have you tried writing when you're dressed to mimic the Mitchellin man?🥴

The school i govern in (infant school) has increased its outdoor learning as part of its panedmic response. Reception was always free flow indoor / outdoor areas and have 2 forest school sessions a week, plus a time on the bikes and scooters. The children are allowed in obviously but they arent sat in all day. The school invested in big canopies to keep areas dry. This year they have extended that philosophy to year 2. They try and have half the clsss outside with a TA doing an activity and then swap so those in the class can spread out more.
We are lucky with good outdoor space and good staffing levels and sensible uniform and invested in outdoor canopies over a few years now.

I think it's a case of 'those that can, should'

It's a non-starter for implementation across all schools and age groups, certainly beyond EYFS

@Iwantalonglie
Why would that concern you? If the teachers organised the making dens and playing in the mud kitchen so it covered the learning objectives for the day?
Not a criticism @Iwantalonglie but you have no idea how the curriculum works. I’m a Y6 teacher, there is no way that with any will in the world I can adapt the objectives I have to teach into playing in a mud kitchen or building a den. Key stage 2 curriculum, just doesn’t lend itself to adapting to outdoor learning, it’s just not possible. It is, unfortunately, a very intense and formal style of objectives.

Yeah the nursery I work at has a really decent amount of outside space - we’ve always spent a lot of time outside! We are the only nursery in the area with an outside space at all! So we can do it no problem - but the others won’t be able to!
We have the children outside most of the day at the moment - parents have provided lots of warm clothes and we have rain suits for all children that we provide!

The national curriculum beyond EYFS does not lend itself well to practical learning in this manner, on the whole - there are elements that could be adapted, but when we need to teach more complex content such as subordinate clauses, commas for possession, columnar addition and subtraction etc etc ultimately we need more formal direct teaching and practice on paper. It blows all over the place indoors with the windows open so it would be basically impossible outdoors, and children would be so cold from sitting outside their fingers would struggle to write anyway.

We could “do” some nice jazzy outdoor things, it would be lovely and we could make it good fun, but be under no pretence it would be standard KS1 education - it would be childcare.

DD spent most of her 2 1/2 years at nursery playing outside. She was a busy busy little toddler who spent most of her time in wellies and waterproofs (there is such good kit these days).

Would anyone choose a school based on this?

So choose a wholly outdoor nursery?

Or choose a primary school where 50% of the lessons are outdoors?

Its freezing and snowing!
Would I spend hours outdoors? No.
Would I want my kids to spend hours outdoors? No.

ODFOD

Right, so a no from you @beaverbill. Though, whatever else you learnt at school, it clearly wasn't manners or reasoned argument .

Many many people in this country think it's sensible for very young children to be inactive and sat at desks for long periods of time.

At my school we deliver in KS1 curriculum through continuous provision. So the children can choose to be in the outside area for a large proportion of the day.

It's not stopped the spread of covid though.

How's everyone going to pay for all the kit? There are thousands of families who struggle to feed themselves or having to choose between heat and food, those families aren't suddenly going to have extra cash for boots, waterproofs, thermal layers etc.

@Scarby9

During the original lockdown, when only keyworker and vulnerable children were in school, ad the curriculum was suspended, this is how my local school worked. They are lucky that each classroom has a firedoor and coned off a strip of field or playground for each class where they did most of their activities. But a) the curriculum was suspended - most of the KS2 curriculum does not lend itself to working outside in winter. Sustained concentration on writing or solving mathematical problems requires being more Require

And the weather was beautiful. We did loads of outdoor learning, making dens, exploring nature, learning names of trees etc. Great stuff and I’m sure they did learn things but sadly not what a year 6 child needs to get them through SATS (which everyone has forgotten about). Primary education isn’t all finger painting and pasta pictures you know.

@Iwantalonglie Do you know the KS2 curriculum? You think that 10 year olds will be ok just measuring raining if happens to rain? Yes lots of primary schools plan in some outdoor learning, but it's absolutely not possible for the day-in-day-out following of the curriculum. How will they all sit outside in 2 degrees and drizzle doing an extended writing session? Where will they all sit? Or are they not sitting while they've got their algebra textbook page open and workbook- are they just measuring the temperature outside for 5 maths lessons per week. And what about all the video clips and lesson prep the teacher has done for the interactive whiteboard for the curriculum- ok the teachers will just rewrite the whole of the curriculum for outdoor learning in all the free time they have?

I think you're very much confusing the continuous provision that can be achieved outside up to reception level (and possibly a lot of year 1) where the children are learning to count, blend sounds, practise fine and gross motor skills, with the whole of primary where children are expected to master complex mathematical concepts, write fully paragraphed narratives with accurate grammatical features, examine and challenge historical accounts, etc.

Outdoor provision for the whole of primary would be child care.

And the same as people above have mentioned - space is often limited for the whole of the school to be out.

Yes, it is possible to have children outside for 6 hours a day if they are dressed appropriately. But I guess you also think that it's reasonable to expect all primary teachers to go out and buy themselves thermal clothing for them to be outside all day, plus the school to buy for all the kids whose parents won't (what will you do with all the children who turn up in slip on shoes and a thin coat with no hood?). Would anyone who works in an office be ok if their boss told them on a Friday that all desks were being moved to the courtyard from Monday, we'll put up a tarpaulin in case of rain, please make sure you are suitably dressed (because kids can be outside all day at forest school so it must be fine) and bring a clipboard and something from home to act as a paperweight in case it gets a bit breezy.

Your kids must be very young OP.
All well and good to do writing your name in mud with a stick for half an hour but not so easy to teach Y5 and 6 the things they need!