Outdoor Education
With Adventure activities forming a significant part of the PE National Curriculum 2008, we aim to promote the expansion of these experiences for children and young people. The City and County of Swansea has services dedicated to providing adventure activities available to schools during term time.
The service, managed as part of the youth service, has built up good relationships with schools over the last 18 years developing resources and programmes for schools at subsidised rates.
Education Effectiveness will aim to support schools in increasing the opportunities available to children and young people for this kind of experience, in partnership with the staff at Rhosili and Borfa House Residential Centres. We plan to support schools in providing Adventure activities in curriculum time for pupils, that will develop skills and the desire to seek out ever more healthy adventure. Adventure activity may start for children at primary school with problem solving and orienteering activities around the school site. We are working with the instructors at Rhosili Outdoor Centre as part of the PE and School Sport project, to examine the learning involved in taking children out into the countryside within their own locality. Our hope is that with this support, teachers will feel able to plan, manage risk and implement their own adventure visits of this nature to locations identified as being appropriate for such visits. This might be beneficial as a pre-cursor to arranging a residential visit for pupils to places like Rhosili and Borfa House, for activities requiring staff with specific technical qualifications, such as climbing and water based activities.
As this field of work is developed, we hope to respond to the training needs of teachers so that they can be effective in setting high standards for their school. The Outdoor Education Advisors Panel (OEAP) has produced a set of Outdoor Learning Cards as a resource for primary and secondary teachers on the four areas of Journeying, Orienteering, Team building and Bouldering. Education Effectiveness plans to use the training for the use of these cards in schools as a starting point for support in this area.
Educational Visits
High quality experiences outside the classroom are of enormous value in the education of children and young people. The most significant formative experiences of a young persons life can frequently be traced back to an educational experience of this nature. Following proposed recommendations issued to Local Authorities, Education Effectiveness is supporting schools in arranging educational visits and is working to ensure a common understanding of new standards for ensuring that planned visits achieve their educational outcomes.
Under new arrangements each LEA is asked to have a nominated advisor to oversee matters relating to visits and each school is asked to have a nominated Educational Visits Co-ordinator to liaise with the LEA. Training is planned to help these nominees recognise their responsibilities in terms of visits, to become familiar with guidance and to recognise local and national procedures for ensuring that adventurous activities are approved. The monitoring of visit arrangements is also a requirement of new arrangements. Training will also follow in supporting visit leaders in recognising in planning safe and stimulating out of classroom experiences for children and young people.
