Pastures few
The sadness of silent play spaces
You will have seen it in the news this week: state school kids have far less access to open and green spaces than their better off peers. Health and wellbeing impacted. Beleaguered headteachers forced to organise play in community parks. And even where there is space, sometimes in abundance, coverage of a stuffed curriculum provides the other half of the grim pedipalp in a movement that sees school fields and forest school tree circles, along with gymnasiums (where they still exist), as the least used teaching spaces outside of a child’s mandated 120 minutes of physical education each week.
But we are only in this situation because we have allowed a poisoned and partial paradigm to lead us down, out and away from what we know is really needed.
Not so free schools
It’s worth remembering that we are so far down this road now that some children are actually attending schools that have no access to outdoor space, let alone any green and pleasant lands. And these are new schools proposed, designed, planned and approved to meet the needs of the children attending and the community being served. New schools designed to realise powerful visions of a better future for our young people. New schools that consciously encapsulate the very best provision to enable all those involved to flourish. New schools, that for some reason, have no outdoor space.
Why did we let this happen?
Playground parking
and the fact that schools have felt compelled to sell off playing fields to generate much-needed revenue really needs little further elaboration. Of course these open spaces are valuable; all types of valuable, but the irony of this is awful; the contradiction overwhelming. And the poverty of experience, let alone the damage that is being done, is now a scandal that needs to be reversed.
How did we let ourselves get here?
A Carolean education imaginary
And the staggering thing is that none of this is new. None of it.
Knowledgeable and passionate voices globally have, for a long time, articulated their alarm at swingeing practices which have ignored all evidence and experience of what children and young people actually need to thrive and survive. So we now find ourselves in a bit of a situation. Many believe that mainstream is actually hurting people. It’s certainly changing behaviour. Council spokespeople make their pleas to angry and frustrated parents that school is still the best place for their children to be, but rising numbers - set to rise further still - remain unconvinced. And it’s not just a lack of green spaces. It’s a seemingly untouchable culture of high stakes testing that is actually brittle and anachronistic. It’s a narrow and irrelevant curriculum, devoid of real meaning or purpose for our young people. It’s a sad and lengthening litany of crises - funding, staffing, attendance, unwellbeing - and above all, it’s a total lack of a compelling and sustainable vision for what state education in the Carolean era needs to look like.
It’s all crumbling. But at least this will demand a comprehensive rebuild.
“You got any better suggestions?”
Well, yes, actually.
The beautiful thing is that we know what needs to be done. We’ve really got this.
We have the schematics, the tools and in droves, the people and talent to do it. Those that lead us just need to finally emancipate learners and learning by channelling their inner Quint, who in the final third of Jaws, when he eventually realises that his time-worn methods have come up short turns to the young ichthyologist Matt Hooper and, with great reluctance and well-submerged humility, asks, “What exactly can you do with these things of yours?”