Outdoor education programs can be life-changing for students, who develop crucial social skills and a newfound relationship with Australia’s natural environment.
From preschool to the secondary years, a prominent theme in education is how offering students a closer connection to the physical world brings them significant benefits.
Schools around Australia are developing interesting and innovative ways to help their students become familiar with nature, while also developing important personal skills such as confidence, resilience and independence.
Outdoor education programs are central to this strategy, taking students out of their comfortzone while still offering support and guidance to ensure time spent in the environment is an enjoyable experience.
Dairy farming might not seem like the most obvious starting point for outdoor education, but for Melbourne’s Caulfield Grammar School it is a key plank of the program. The school’s Yarra Junction campus on the city’s rural fringe sits on a 150-hectare site which is home to more than 200 cows and features a high ropes course and a residential complex for staff and students.
For many students, even just the chance to spend time in nature with the ability to walk through mud and get dirty is a novelty. “That experience to come into a natural environment and not be surrounded by buildings, but to be surrounded by bush and native animals and plants and have the smell of the fire – it’s something that a lot of kids don’t get exposed to in their regular world,” says Yarra Junction campus head Sarah Klein.
“Experiencing contrasting things to your everyday normal is a good thing, but doing that in the outdoors ... is a really good thing for students.”
Sydney’s Redlands School has a High Country campus near Jindabyne in southern NSW which hosts winter school and camps. It has offered outdoor and experiential learning opportunities for more than 40 years to students ordinarily based on the lower north shore. “We know how beneficial these programs are for developing greater levels of independence and responsibility,” Redlands principal Sean Corcoran says.
“Living in acommunity on the edge of the Snowy Mountains gives students the opportunity to connect, learn and lead, to foster deep understanding and critical thinking.” To extend that opportunity, the school is launching the nine-week Moonbah program for year 9 students in 2025 after a successful trial.
“The rich and varied interdisciplinary curriculum that will be offered for year 9 students in the Moonbah program will provide students with the opportunity to be immersed in nature, and develop skills of self-awareness, decision-making, confidence, resilience and communication,” Corcoran says.
“There are clear positive impacts on students’ wellbeing, relationships, self-confidence, resilience, engagement with learning and achievement that come from residential experiential learning programs.
Queenwood – a girls’ school based in Mosman – offers outdoor education and camps to students from kindergarten through to the senior high school years. Deputy principal Belinda Moore says the school has ‘‘worked closely with our camps provider Land’s Edge.. to push the boundaries of what can be accomplished on camp and to think carefully about the activities, the allocation of staff, the distance we travel to get to camp and even the food, that ensures students and staff are more comfortable with the challenge of being away from home overnight’’.
“We also work very closely with parents to ensure they are fully briefed and aware of the expectation that it is a compulsory part of a Queenwood education,’’ she adds. “We do all that we can to ensure that every girl attends, even if compromises have to be made. We know that we are on the right track because we have almost over 95 per cent attendance across the school.”
This support is something each school reports, with participants reflecting on how outdoor education has stimulated their personal growth. “We deliberately provide opportunities for kids to step out of their comfort zone because once they overcome something that they think is hard, it makes the next hard thing a little easier to overcome,” Caulfield Grammar’s Sarah Klein says. “There’s always a big improvement in student confidence, and that makes all of the staff here really proud that we have young people walking away from these experiences knowing they can do this.”
It is a similar approach at Queenwood, where students are put under the “right kind” of stress. “The girls are set challenges which are simultaneously uncomfortable, unfamiliar, even frightening, but also eminently achievable,” Moore says. “They have to persevere through the discomfort and, in so doing, they learn that feelings can change and emotions are not always the most reliable guide.
By not listening so closely to the inner voice telling them that it’s too hard and they should give up now, they acquire the resilience they will need for life.” Redlands says its experiential learning programs help students feel inspired and refreshed, and better prepared to tackle their schooling.
“They enjoyed having a real connection to our country and said getting to walk the land and learning about it was really empowering,” Corcoran says. “They also felt the community living was one of the best aspects of the Moonbah program trial –making new friends and broadening their knowledge. Overall, parent feedback has been very positive with parents excited that their children will get to experience this opportunity.”