*Please note this transcript is generated using an automated service and it may not be 100% accurate
I’m at Connaught Water in Epping Forest on a cloudy school day morning. I’m here to meet a group of kids from Gearies, a primary school on the East London, Essex border.
If I scream your ears will really hurt
So are you gonna scream?
No
they seem pretty interested in my microphone.
hungry, hungry, hungry
Well, not that interested. Although we’re not in a classroom, the kids are here today as part of their curriculum. Most children and young people in the UK spend very little time outside
There may be many reasons why. The shape of the school day does’t include much outside play, especially in secondary school. If you don’t have a garden at home, you have to be taken to a park to play in the grass. You need to live close to that park too. A lot of parents and carers are anxious about their kids playing outdoors. And if you’re a child from a low-income, black, brown or minority household, your nature access is likely to be even more diminished. This can have a huge impact on health and well being.
These are some of the reasons why Gearies Primary School has decided that nature play should be a key part of the curriculum.
In this episode, I’m going to find out more. I’m going to hear about the impact this project has on the here and now, and not to be dramatic, the impact this has for the future of the planet.
I’m Talia Randall and you’re listening to Voices of Epping Forest. Episode 4. Woodlice and Ducks
I think it’d be a nice place for ducks to be…
Once a week, Gearies primary school takes out a bunch of children to bird watch, jump in puddles and play with sticks.
What have you found Mr Lee? Are you seeing how deep it is?
We learnt long sticks to check how deep it is so you don’t suddenly disappear.
I start my morning running around after the kids. I’ve only just met them, but they are talkative, confident and funny. They know quite a lot about the wildlife. So I’m here to learn from them and find out why they love coming on these trips.
These two are quite good bird experts.
Are you? What birds have you seen or heard today?
We saw the Canada goose before and we saw, um, we saw magpie. We heard a blue tit..
And the one that sounds like its name
A chiff chaff. Chiff chaff?
What does a chiff chaff sound like?
chiff chaff chiff chaff…It was very funny. Hello doggie.
What do you love about going on the nature trips with school?
I really like them. So one reason is because I get to skip school. And the second reason is because I like to like, see whats about. Like, like, because usually it’s like, you wouldn’t see birds in the same spot every single day. So I like to see, like where they go and what kind of places they like to travel to.
Do you think that the school nature trips make you want to do more nature trips yourself? Like at the weekend or when you’re older?
Yeah, definitely. Definitely.
Miles, can you tell me, like, what kind of things that you do with the school in terms of going out and playing in nature? Is that something that you do a lot?
Yeah, I help plant trees with Mr. Lee as well in the school. We planted four last week.
Four, just last week? What do you love about planting trees?
I like it because you can get messy and you see what they’re growing. Sometimes they’ve got fruit trees and sometimes you don’t know what they are.
What else do you love about, um, the nature trips you do with school?
Nature is really pretty.
Nature is really pretty.
And I really like the texture of nature. Some leaves are actually furry.
Some leaves are furry. Can you describe what this one feels like here?
It’s like a teeny bit furry with tiny hair. And it feels like it’s smooth. It’s sort of soft.
These children are around 9, 10 years old. And they are super curious and enthusiastic about their surroundings.
Theres so much to look at and see
It’s so amazing.
Isn’t it?
They’re really keen to tell me what they’re interested in.
They look similar but they’ve got a red, a red, no, a red one with yellow on the tip and green legs. I really like moorhens.
Do you? What do you like about them?
That they’re really brightly coloured even though they’re black.
There’s a lot of self-directed learning.
So tell me your names again.
I’m Javari.
I’m Kayal. The way they swim so fast is because when humans open their hands and they swim past, water goes through so they don’t really go that fast.
But the ducks have webbed feet.
So when they push, a lot more water goes back and they go forward. That’s how they swim.
It’s kind of like levers, like. But it’s kind of also like how humans swim. It’s like, with their feet. But ducks use their, like, kind of feet. Feet, hands, or whatever.
Feet, hands is a really nice way to describe it.
They go like that and they have like webs so a lot more water goes back and they use both hands. So that’s how they go so far.
Most if not all of these kids haven’t been to Epping Forest before, but their school makes sure they aren’t a stranger to nature. This project developed as part of the recovery curriculum when we were emerging from the Covid lockdowns. Their teacher, Dan Lee, explains the origins of the project.
Getting out into nature and these nature trips is something that you do quite a lot at the school. It’d be great to hear a bit about why that’s so important for you and your students.
Yeah, so we, we started the project, um, when we just came out of COVID. How do we get children back learning, attaining at a high level, their English, their maths, and back in school. And we, we were thinking, no, our recovery curriculum really needs to look at their personal, social, emotional wellbeing, their, their mental health wellbeing, and their, their connection to the world outside.
Because my, my specialism is very much the younger children. Yeah. So we were thinking for our three and four year olds, they’ve just had two years where you’ve been told stay indoors, don’t socialise, protect yourself, protect the NHS. Which was right. We get that, we’re not saying that there’s, that message was wrong.
But we’re saying as a two, three year old to then come back out. And then to start building that connection with nature, we, we looked at the research around it and it, and a lot of research said that parents, the anxiety about children coming out into the nature is supported by parents, parents feel they can trust schools and trust you’re in a very powerful position as a teacher. So parents trust you to do the right thing. They trust you to do what’s right for the child. So we started exploring that with our youngest children and just very simple trips to local parks, local woodlands, um, local lakes, just to get the children out, out and about and reconnecting with nature.
And then the project grew from there. Um, So then it grew into this project around how do we connect with nature and how, how do we support the children in making choices about how they connect with nature and what kind of nature that excites them and then how do we build that, that bond that hopefully becomes a lifelong passion.
The children find it so exciting that that fear of the mud on the hands, the, the, the, the grit in the fingernails, the, we get home, we wash and we clean that, that that’s overcome because of the excitement of the, the, going out and coming home and rushing to tell mum and dad about what they saw.
And we pick places that are free. So then the idea is you can then go back there and see if you can find that great crested grebe. See if you can find that fungi that was really exciting under the tree. See if you can find that space in the woods that, that was like a den. And take your parents there.
Other than the kind of germ thing and the other thing is like making sure that you’ve got your, you’ve got your outdoor gear that’s separate, which is why things like funding is so important and why it’s so important that it comes from school. Yeah. Cause you can manage that bit. Cause you know, that those are my damp shoes and that’s fine.
Cause I think that that is another thing that a lot of people are worried about when it comes to outdoor play is like, Oh, these are just, these are my trainers. So I don’t want to mess them up. Yeah. But when you do it through schools or through those organised. things you’ve kind of got that covered because you’ve got access to funding and stuff like that they’ve got their high-vis on if that gets muddy that’s not a big deal you know
yeah and we do things like with with brothers and sisters if you’ve got old wellies send them in exactly if you’ve got old raincoats send them in and then we just have a central stash of raincoats change of trousers old shoes, wellington boots and we’ve got them all so if you’ve got them at home brilliant if you haven’t got them at home not a problem we’ve got the stuff we can grab it. And you see today we keep the trips really simple it’s about being in nature it’s not there’s no we don’t ever bring worksheets we don’t bring pencils it’s it’s about that moment of being in nature in that moment and hopefully they’ll choose to come back bring family but but it’s more about just experiencing that immersion and being out in nature rather than completing a worksheet, doing a fancy activity, having a load of cool resources.
It’s just getting out and going to places that are free, on public transport that’s free, and just getting out and enjoying that moment.
It’s so important, it sounds so simple, but actually it can have quite a profound impact. Have you seen any longitudinal impact in some of the students in your school?
So what, what we’ve done is, so very early on, the project started with that idea of, you know, recovery curriculum. But not about academics, about the child, about what we actually really want for our children. Then what we found is that the more we found the kids were just really enjoying this, and this is just really special, and the parents were really buying into it and really enjoying the projects as well.
We then started looking at, so what is the UK’s record on children engaging with nature and how that develops further? And we started looking at the concept of, If we’re looking at climate change and protecting the environment and improving our rivers, you know, these, it’s going to be these kids in 20 years time when they’re older.
Where are our future scientists coming from? Where are our future geography students coming from? And we started looking at UK research..
Dan talks me through research he’s been looking into that’s been guiding these nature trips. There is a lack of representation of people from minority backgrounds who study geography programmes at University.
For example, research by the organisation Black Geographers found that in the 2018-2019 academic year only 1.7 per cent of the total admitted undergraduate students were Black. At a staffing level, in that same year, there were only 10 Black geography professors across the whole of the UK.
So it horrified me that we might not have from our school any future geographical scientists because I have a geography degree and it absolutely horrified me as a teacher that the kids I teach might find they face barriers to going into geography and science. So we looked at the research behind that and it pointed to these kind of projects.
There’s a book called Last Child in the Woods. Um, it’s an American book, but it’s an award winning book that talks about what you do as you get children immersed in nature. As early as possible and once they stand in nature, there’s a lovely quote, once they stand in nature, they fall in love with nature Forever, and then there was another quote that we loved which was by getting children out and into these places They no longer see school as a polite place sort of prison.
And we were like, Ooh, are we a polite prison? Do we bring them in, sit down at your chairs, work all day. You go out for a break, you come back in, you have your dinner, you go out for break in the afternoon, you go home. And it was, and it was a beautiful little idea that doing these kinds of things show that school’s much more wider experience than just classroom playground home.
And, and so we took those two concepts of if a child stands in nature. They’ll fall in love with nature for the rest of their life. And this idea of it’s not incarceration, it’s out and getting out in a real wider sense.
And, and we think it’s sounds like we’re not oversimplifying it but it’s just coming out like you’ve seen the way they’re talking now trying to work out how birds swim.
It’s amazing how they’re talking about it and it genuinely makes me feel that like actually we we might be okay as a species because I’ve been feeling quite it’s hard not to feel depressed about it you were talking about them seeing the rivers and learning about the state of the rivers and the sewage and actually when they’re this curious and it’s folded into their daily life, it makes me feel like actually we, we might be in safe hands here.
You were talking to Jasleen earlier who’d never experienced birdwatching before. And she was just like, every child should bird watch, it’s so much fun. They’re going away and living and breathing and eating this stuff and coming back. And like I said, I don’t know much about water voles, but they’ll come back the next day and tell me everything about a water vole and how they get mixed up with rats, but they’re not rats. And they tell us all these things. And then we sit there, yeah, and we think, do you know what? You guys, if you keep this learning going, and if the research is right that you do keep this learning going, yeah, these are going to be geologists, geographic students, they are going to be environmental scientists.
Absolutely, town planners.
yeah, they’re gonna, they’re gonna do that.
You know, just the statistics you were saying earlier about like, those jobs are how we experience the world, and if there’s only a tiny percentage of the human population that’s doing those jobs, I guess our cultural experiences that we bring to that isn’t going to be represented. But in 20 years time,
yeah,
might look a lot better.
that’s what, that’s what we’re hoping.
I could chat about this all day, but Dan and I don’t have any longer to talk, because we’ve got some important playing to do. Like trying to interview some woodlice.
We want woodlice in our podcast don’t we, famous woodlice
Yeah and they’re gonna be stars!
I thought the kids would enjoy playing with my microphone, so we bring it to a dead tree to see if we can hear the woodlice scurrying around.
I can hear it. I can see a little.
You can hear tiny, tiny creepy crawly legs.
What if they speak – hello, how are you? I’m a little woodlouse.
I heard a little crackling noise. It’s like cewcewcew
This is the most fun I’ve had in ages. Genuinely.
Well, this is kind of why we do this.
As well as chasing bugs and learning about ducks, there’s a wellbeing element that is crucial to this project. To find out more, I chatted with Tim, who works with the school on these trips.
My role’s a bit different in the school. I’m a play therapist, so I’m here for kind of mental health support. But what we found is that this kind of play is just really good for just all areas of mental health that we’ve been working around. Um, for building confidence, for like, finding moments of independence, for finding social connections for loads of children with social anxiety. It’s just an easy way of covering all those spaces in one go.
Personally, I have a lot of nostalgia for this kind of play. I, uh, yeah, I grew up in Somerset, in a little village, probably quite odd one out. Um, and there, the kind of nearby woods was where I spent loads of my time playing. Damming streams and getting muddy and playing with sticks and making fires and all of that sort of stuff is uh, it’s just a really nice way to play creatively.
So as a sensory environment, this is totally different to a classroom. Yeah. Where you’re sitting at a desk and you’re learning from books and this involves your whole, your whole body. Children come out and they’re, they’re smelling and tasting and, and, and feeling stuff.
And that, and that kind of direction, I think, um, people would describe it as top-down or bottom up. It’s kind of the opposite of using your brain to control your limbs and things moving in that direction. Um, when you have sensory experience like this, your brain is processing all of these signals all at once.
And research is suggesting that that gives you a break. Thinking in the opposite direction gives you a break and a respite. And that makes sense in terms of our felt experience of being outside. You know, it’s why we go outside as adults. It’s where we would go to have a rest and a break. There’s just so many lines of enquiry and it encourages, I think it encourages, I’m not a teacher, and I think it encourages teachers to follow those lines of enquiry, and I think that’s pretty healthy for teachers to be doing instead of everything coming from the teacher, for more of it to be directed by the children.
And, and here, like, you don’t really have any choice about that. There’s children over there playing with a stick. They’ve chosen to do that. And you kind of have to follow that because, you know, you can’t, you can’t just shut down those lines of enquiry and you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t want to because you see the enthusiasm and the, and the energy they’re putting into it. So, the learning outside has a massive momentum.
They’ve still got that stick there really. I mean it’s more like a tree. It’s massive, yeah. I think this is exactly it, isn’t it? Just the curiosity. Like, I’ve only met them today, but you know, they just have loads of questions. As an adult, even as someone who’s interested in nature, it’s a real reminder of like, that playful curiosity is important for any age.
Yeah, playful curiosity is great. It’s a great way of describing it. Being able to be creative with how you’re learning is, is, is, I feel like that’s how we, how we kind of naturally learn most effectively. Um, and combining it with other senses always makes it more, more salient and more salient, more memorable. And they’ll, they’ll remember learning about coots and moorhens because they’ll, you know, smells and, and textures that, that will bring those memories back as well.
Exactly.
Um, I think kids encode memories in a much more sensory way than adults do. We tend to verbalise things and then recall the story of things.
Whereas children tend to remember, tend to remember things. I think it’s why childhood memories are often kind of triggered by smells or songs or stuff like that. So, so, so I think one of the interesting things, legacies of this kind of work is that those senses and smells will, will drop them back into, into memories in a totally different way to written word in the classroom or to, or to trying to tell a story.
All this talk of sensory memories has got me thinking about my own childhood. Although I grew up in inner London, I had a lot of outdoor play as a child. I grew up on a small council estate and us kids were always playing out. Running around on the grass pitch in the middle of the estate, ignoring the no ball game sign.
For a city kid, it was quite a wild childhood. However, at the edge of the estate there was a nature reserve that, unfortunately, was always locked. I don’t remember the gates ever being open. Those locked gates were a message.
A message. That the likes of me and my friends were not to be trusted with nature. I actually made a whole other podcast about this idea of who is and who isn’t to be trusted with nature spaces because these locked gates made a huge impression on me. It took me a while to feel as though I truly belonged in nature.
Spending time with these children today, I really hope that they feel that sense of belonging deep in their bones.
no, it’s not a puddle, it’s a pond!
In this episode, there’s been a lot of talk about the future. In particular, what jobs the kids from Gearies might want to do when they’re older. But, I wonder if that’s quite a lot of pressure to put on young people. I wonder if that pressure can maybe compromise that playful curiosity that is just so valuable in itself. It brings to mind something that Tim, the playworker from Gearies primary school, told me on our walk.
We value scientific investigation of wild places. So there is, there is that direction and a lot of children have shown interest in that and that’s a lovely line for them to be able to follow.
For me though, the idea of this being a sensory experience that you can take on, um, as a useful tool to learn to gain agency over your own mood and sense of feelings is as useful as a way of understanding nature. You know, when I, when I spend time in the woods, it makes me feel this way and this way.
And that’s a really useful thing to have going on into, into your adult, into your adult life to know that you can find those wild spaces and they can bring you, they can be literally grounding like that is a really useful tool to leave these kids with. I think it’s a great gift to give to a child to let them know that it’s all right to go somewhere wild and just sit and be in it. Sit and bird watch or watch wildlife or just just be in in the woods and breathe.
and grab a really giant stick.
And grab a really yeah.
Thank you for listening to Voices of Epping Forest.
CREDITS
Voices of Epping Forest is written, produced and presented by me, Talia Randall
The mixing and mastering is by Jamie Payne
And the publishing partner is Aunt Nell.
Voices of Epping Forest was made possible through a commission from Essex Cultural Diversity Project supported by Arts Council England, in partnership with Epping Forest Heritage Trust, and supported by the City of London Corporation, Epping Forest and Essex County Council.
About Voices of Epping Forest
Many people in the UK struggle to access nature. Podcaster Talia Randall has teamed up with the Essex Cultural Diversity Project and the Epping Forest Heritage Trust to encourage more people to enjoy what Epping Forest has to offer. Epping Forest is owned and managed by the City of London Corporation.
Voices of Epping Forest doesn’t shy away from the visible and invisible barriers many people face when getting into the outdoors. The podcast also celebrates the diversity of those who visit Epping Forest. Community voices are at the heart of this podcast—these are the people broadening nature access for everyone.
To find out more about the Podcast and listen to the full series, please follow this link.
