Early Childhood Outdoors, The National Centre for Outdoor Play, Learning and Wellbeing works to generate advocacy and action at all levels towards the mission of “more children thriving outdoors, more often and for longer, benefiting from richer and more meaningful environments offering authentic, rewarding and satisfying experiences”.  

Parents and carers are key to increasing the amount of time young children spend outside each day and to enabling a life long love of being in and caring for nature.  

Early Childhood Outdoors seeks to raise parental awareness regarding the importance and value of being outside in childhood and beyond. We also seek to support parents and carers to make a wealth of outdoor experiences  possible for their children and to deepen their appreciation and enjoyment of being outside and in nature with them.

As well as working to enable providers in their support for parents and carers in taking their children outdoors as much as possible, we’ll also seek to encourage parental demand and expectation from early years providers in giving their children plenty of high quality time and experience outside every day.

Early Childhood Outdoors helps a wide range of people working in the field to meet each other, get to know about what each of us are doing and find shared interests and aspirations.

Through an annual development day, hosted in Sheffield during April/May with an international guest, and other more local and focused meshwork gatherings, we’ll be inspired by each other, spark collaborations, cook things up together and make things happen, quite possibly with unexpected outcomes…

Early Childhood Outdoors supports settings that are pushing the boundaries of working with the outdoors and encourages them to share their strong outdoor practice, inspiring and energising others.

We’ll also help them make contact with, visit and support other pioneering centres around the UK and abroad, so that they can find the nourishment and enrichment that will help them to achieve more of their own aspirations.

Acting as a source directory, Early Childhood Outdoors helps to share resources that support the mission of “more children thriving outdoors, more often and for longer, benefiting from richer and more meaningful environments offering authentic, rewarding and satisfying experiences”. 

These range from the locations of free online resources, such as documents, video and training, to information about books, film and relevant CPD opportunities. 

We will also encourage and enable the production of new materials, especially by members of the growing Early Childhood Outdoors meshwork community.

Early Childhood Outdoors seeks to make links and collaborate with organisations sharing the mission to increase the amount and quality of outdoor experience children from birth to seven have in their daily lives. 

Through liaising with a wide range of ‘collaborators’ we’ll aim to enhance each other’s work, enabling and supporting however we can.  There may also be opportunities to contribute to the work of our collaborators or increase their reach via linking up members of the Early Childhood Outdoors meshwork.

Alongside developing understanding of the outdoors as a powerful learning environment, Early Childhood Outdoors works to investigate and promote the enormous therapeutic potential of being outdoors for mental and physical wellbeing.Early Childhood Outdoors connects and enables leading settings working outdoors with the therapeutic elements of play, movement, plants, animals and sensitive adult interaction, both as specific therapeutic interventions and as more general programmes supporting all young children. We’ll work to share learning between these pioneers, across the UK and abroad, and to disseminate such practice more widely, particularly with paediatric health services such as occupational and speech therapy.

As the National Centre for Outdoor Play, Learning and Wellbeing, Early Childhood Outdoors is active in encouraging and guiding outdoor play research in the UK. 

Forming links with universities and other academic institutions in all four countries of the UK, we aim to find mechanisms for sharing the knowledge that is being generated through their post-graduate and post-doctorate research, and to make research findings available for practitioners to apply in developing provision and practice outdoors.

An emphasis for Early Childhood Outdoors is researchful practice and practice-based research – and there are very many questions yet to be explored regarding young children in the outdoors!  We’ll pose questions to encourage a wider range of research at all levels - from dissertations to funded studies, initiate and support communities of practice projects, and encourage outdoor focused practitioner research at early years conferences such as BECERA.

Nature’s responsiveness to the play drives of the child helps build the attachment to nature that in turn creates an ‘ecological identity’ – a deep identification with nature as part of the growing sense of self. 

When children intuitively know that they are part of nature and it is part of them, with little sense of separation from it, they feel at home in the outdoors, are able to be nurtured by nature, and experience a need to care for and protect it throughout their lives.

A key driver of the Early Childhood Outdoors meshwork’s work is to increase young children’s contact and interaction with the every day nature around them, deepening their relationship with both the physical and living natural world. 

Through a range of support and collaborations, we’ll research ecological identity and education for sustainable development, raise awareness and share action, working to foreground and embed these important ideas in practice across the UK.

The quality of children’s outdoor environments and how well they work for both the children and the adults in them are currently not well enough considered by those who design and create them. 

Early Childhood Outdoors seeks to bring landscape architects and designers into contact and dialogue with early childhood education professionals, so that the two areas of expertise can work together towards understanding how to make really powerful places for play, wellbeing and learning.

As well as the on-going Landscapes for Early Childhood national network (click here for full information about the network), we aim to support the development and influence of well-informed, nature-based outdoor space designers, encourage providers to harness their expertise, and connect settings with those who can help with the design and development of rich and effective outdoor environments.

Alongside the inspiration and energy that events and short courses generate, long term coaching, guiding and mentoring is necessary for significant and embedded development in provision and practice outdoors. 

Early Childhood Outdoors builds the capacity of independent outdoor specialist consultants to work over time and on site with whole teams at individual settings through the Unlocking Learning Outdoors framework. 

Developed by Professor Jan White, Professor of Practice in early childhood development and education, this framework provides an extensive, targeted structure that enables settings to harness the potential of the outdoors as a learning environment in early childhood, and supports consultants in outdoor provision to be fully effective in their work with settings.

Early Childhood Outdoors aims to increase the confidence and competence of the workforce in working in the outdoors with children from birth to seven, with emphasis on the daily experience young children have outside in their early years settings.  To this end we work to build the possibility for and support the success of CPD events offered by our meshwork, collaborators and links further afield. 

We are building an Early Childhood Outdoors ‘college’ through which members of the meshwork share their specialist interests and expertise, providing advanced CPD and longer opportunities to share, think and dig into the pedagogy of education outdoors.  Study visits within and beyond the UK are a core part of this, via our international collaborators.

As a third thread to this strand, we are exploring qualifications in outdoor practice including how these would integrate with current academic courses.