On a chilly November morning Tilly Newey and Woody Morton buried Briony Nicol
at the top of a wooded hillside near Letham in the ancient Kingdom of Fife.
They buried her under leaves. Then she sat up and buried each of them. Tilly
is 4 and Woody is 3. Nicol is a nursery assistant at the Secret Garden,
Britain's first all-year, all-weather, outdoor woodland nursery.
After the murder-scene leaf game, Woody and Tilly head for a rope-and-log
swing hanging from a tree. As Tilly swings, Woody tries to whack her with a
stick. “We have stick rules,” Nicol says. “Point it down, Woody. Not up,
down.” Meanwhile other children are under the roots of an overturned tree
playing at being kittens in a den. Some days there is sawing and
fire-lighting, making elf houses or hunting for fungi.
Bending down to pinch a withered mushroom, Tilly tells me with undeniable
logic: “You squish the puffballs because they have puff in them.”
Dressed in thick weatherproof dungarees, neoprene Hunter boots, woolly hats,
and toting Deuter backpacks complete with integral-insulated sitting-mat for
lunchtime, the children evidently don't notice the weather. The only time
anyone mentions temperature all day is to exclaim “I'm a bit hot now”, after
a bit of energetic drumming on a pile of logs. It is 3C (37F) and there is
ice on the ground from a recent snowfall. The children will be outside all
day.
“Small children don't notice the weather,” says Cathy Bache, 48, a former
drama teacher who started the Secret Garden nursery in September last year
after four years as an increasingly outdoor-bound child minder. She now has
14 children attending two or three times a week in a wood above a village 15
miles from St Andrews. Because of the high staff/child ratio, the cost of
Secret Garden is slightly more than a traditional nursery, at £34 a day per
child. For the first time since Bache's nursery began, she has let a
journalist follow the children into the woods to see how they fill their
days. The children start to gather in the park of a local village from
8.30am and by 9.30am are beginning the walk up the hill to get into the
woods by 10am. Activities are determined largely by what the children want
to do. Bache and her assistants may instigate some creativity with nature,
but only those who show an interest need to get involved.
Most of the time is spent in imaginative freeplay. At 11.30am the children sit
on their insulated mats and open their lunchboxes. There is often a lot of
discussion about the contents, just as in any nursery. There is more
freeplay after lunch and a snack at 2.30pm until the children start their
walk back to the village at 4pm and a pick-up between 4.30pm and 5.30pm.
“They just play, they don't have that adult perception that weather is either
good or bad,” Bache says. “Last January I woke up to a ferocious gale: a
tree had come down in my garden. I thought we might have to keep the
children inside. But every parent brought their child prepared for the wind
and rain, so we found a sheltered dip in the woods and spent the day playing
in it - after the children helped me to saw up the fallen tree.”
With £17,000 in backing from the Lottery-funded Awards for All scheme, Bache
has been able to operate five days a week, but this has meant taking on
staff and waterproofing them and some of the children's activities. There is
now a tent and a tarpaulin for very rainy days and she plans to get a stove
for the tent. “It'll be luxury compared with what we've had.” There is also
an arrangement that they can escape to her local village hall if the weather
gets torrential, but you can tell she has little urge to take the easy, or
at least dry, option.
“There's no such thing as bad weather,” she says. “Just the wrong clothes and
the wrong mentality.”
Bache, who recently completed a bushcraft course run by Ray Mears, the
survival expert, was inspired by the outdoor nurseries that she saw while
living in Norway when her own children were small. The idea for outdoor
nurseries first developed in Denmark in the 1950s and has spread across
Scandinavia and to Germany and Switzerland. In Germany there are 700
Waldkindergärten, or woodland nurseries. None of the countries where they've
taken off is exactly balmy, but they are increasingly popular with parents
worried about the cloistered, sedentary lifestyle of the modern child. In
Zurich, Daniel Freigtag, owner of a designer bag company, sends his
four-year-old son up a mountain in all weathers. “The only time that they
cancelled was when a really big blizzard started. They look like miniature
North Sea oil-rig workers in their snow suits,” Freitag says. “But he's
never come home and mentioned the weather.”
The one serious worry they have in woodland nurseries on the Continent is
about Lyme disease, the bacterial infection that causes severe fever and
skin rash and is passed on by ticks. Freitag has to check his son every
night for ticks.
“There is Lyme disease in Britain,” Bache says, “But you can get a tick in
Richmond Park in London - I know because I once did. There are no ticks in
the woods we use, but there are some in woods near by.”
No ticks, but there are red squirrels, deer and pheasants from a local shoot
that start screeching at the end of every winter day. “We found a dead
pheasant,” Tilly tells me. “It had grain in its stomach.” Bache says that
she knew it was recently dead so she let some of the children dissect it.
Pretty much everything they do is led by them. If you stand back and let
children go their own way they create their own magic.”
That means no dogmatic focus on early learning goals handed down by
educationists. Instead, the Secret Garden is thoroughly unstructured, with
the children learning about shapes by looking at different types of leaves,
or floatation by playing with conkers in puddles.
“There is space for children just to be,” Bache says. “Without that
adult-driven thing of goals and activities. If a child wants to stare into a
puddle for 20 minutes, he or she can.” That may sound akin to a Montessori
“child-led” nursery, but Bache says that her influences come from nature,
not theory and in Scotland the pre-school practice is known as “child at the
centre” - a practice that she plugs into.
During the Times visit children careered over fallen logs or tumbled into
twigs. None of them cried or asked to be helped up. “It takes about three
sessions before they learn that we don't do carrying here,” Bache says. The
children learn to walk all day without complaining and to climb trees
without help. “Sometimes you need to show them the best way to get down, but
if you don't lift them into trees they won't go too high to get in trouble.”
Obviously, if a child is really hurt he or she gets the comfort and affection
he or she would receive at any indoor nursery. But the worst accident
they've had has been bits of leaf getting into a child's eye.
Bache has completed a risk assessment for the woods that she uses and has been
inspected by the Care Commission, which in Scotland has the responsibility
for regulating nurseries that in England lies with Ofsted. She says that the
commission was extremely keen on the idea, as was her local education
authority.
“It plugs into a growing movement to get children outside, even in normal
nurseries and schools, as well as the concerns there are about childhood
obesity. Our timing couldn't have been better.”
That's not to say the outdoor life would suit all children - or all parents.
Some adults have been put off by the toilet arrangements. They didn't like
the idea of their offspring having to perch on a collapsible toilet seat out
in the open. Others have taken time to adjust to the ideas of self-reliance
and independence that Bache preaches.
One mother offered to carry her son's backpack of sandwiches and gloves to the
woods for him at the start of each day. “She did admit that she had problems
getting him to carry things. That's no longer the case,” Bache says.
Increasingly, the anecdotal claims of parents and carers about the benefits of
woodland nurseries are being confirmed by academic studies. Peter Häfner, a
researcher at the University of Heidelberg, questioned teachers in Germany
about the performance of Waldkinder- gärten children in their first year at
school compared with their indoor peers. In six categories, including
cognitive tasks, creativity and physical ability, children from the woods
outperformed children from ordinary kindergartens.
“A surprising outcome was that girls especially profited from attending
Waldkindergärten,” Häfner says. “The teachers gave them higher credit for
being tougher and physically more self-confident than other girls.”
On the downside, some European research indicates that children from forest
kindergartens have less developed writing skills than those who have spent
their pre-school days drawing and painting in an indoor nursery. Supporters
of the forest theory contend that writing, computers and tests arrive early
enough in the lives of most modern children.
“I really like that the nursery assistants can't hide behind toys and
equipment and early learning plans,” says Linda Holt, who spends two hours,
three days a week, driving her daughter Tilly to the Secret Garden. “Instead
they have to be creative in the woods and they have to interact properly
with the children.”
Becky Little, the mother of Woody, has seen a change in her son since he
started attending two days a week. “He's more contented,” she says. “There
is no angst in him now, it just dissipates in the woods where he has so much
space to do his own thing. It appealed to me because I spent much of my own
childhood out of doors, being free and I wanted to be able to give that to
him.
“I don't worry about the tree climbing or other supposed dangers, because they
develop their own sense of risk by being able to do things without going too
far. I'm sure it's children who are too protected that get themselves into
problems.”
As for the weather, she admits sometimes she thinks: “What am I doing sending
him out in this. But it's just an adult perception, the children are used to
it and good waterproofs are key. If it's frosty they play with ice and if
it's raining they play in puddles. And I'm glad it's in a wood. It provides
them with some shelter. I'd not be so happy if they were in an open field
all day in horizontal rain.”
secretgardenoutdoor-nursery.co.uk
For information about outdoor nurseries: outdoor-learning.org
