Being Outside More

Sunday morning found me at Ashton Court on the outskirts of Bristol, accompanying my daughter to the last ever session of her teen Nordic Walking group, the end of an era. Some of her fellow walkers will be heading for university in September, and she will be starting at a new college, change is everywhere. It may be inevitable, but it’s not always comfortable. At this stage in the school holidays there is a subtle shift, a sense of the season turning. After so many years with children in the academic system, I have become institutionalised. I feel myself twitching and wanting to set everything in the house in order, to check for outgrown shoes, buy stacks of new stationery. But the reality is that quietly and without consciously registering it, I know that this ‘back to school’ reflex is no longer necessary. I have done my time with name tags and education admin, my youngest child will be 18 in December, it is time to stand down. While my daughter and the group set off with their lead...

This morning I walked in the sunshine down to the local train station with my daughter. I was there solely as a beast of burden, my task was to carry a lightweight but large and unwieldy canvas, a crucial resource for her GCSE art exam on Thursday and Friday this week. Although producing creative work under exam conditions feels rather counter-intuitive to me. Apparently the reason why many exam boards have moved away from the assessment by coursework that was so in vogue when I was taking GCSEs, is that it’s almost impossible to verify whether the work submitted has been produced by student effort alone. Once parents would have shamefacedly admitted that they had done most of their offspring’s coursework, now they have been supplanted by AI. Allegedly. My daughter’s drawing skills far outstrip my own, words are more my thing, and her coursework sketchbook is a thing of original beauty. As I write I am surrounded by many students, as I sit in the barrel-vaulted splendour of the reading...

I have dragged my laptop out into the garden, it is a beautifully blue-skied sunny day, the kind of Easter Monday you hope for but so rarely arrives. My houseplants are having a holiday on the patio in front of me, earlier I topped them up with compost and watered them thoroughly. They are jostled by unexpected breezes, a new reality for them. Inside the house my daughter is planning complicated baking, there are plans for afternoon tea. When I asked the children at work what happens at Easter, I was met with a chorus of “chocolate!”. We are a resolutely secular household, but the break from work and study is welcome. Easter weekend feels like a much more low pressure festival than Christmas, my son is back from university and we’re enjoying having him home. Good food has been eaten and I have performed the traditional ritual of visiting a garden centre and daydreaming in an aisle of seed packets, so much possibility and hope. In ALDI I bought a cheerful strip of bedding plants, jewel ...

  “I’ve put you on Christmas cards today” explains K, handing me a list of children’s names. I am working at a small Forest School setting, covering for a practitioner who is on leave. I was here last week and the sudden temperature drop in a previously mild autumn had taken some children by surprise. This week it feels that equilibrium has been restored, sufficient warm layers applied, a crisp cold day with pale lemon sunlight. And so the year is turning and we must make Christmas cards. Forest School pedagogy is shaped by child-led learning, experimentation, risky play. Which is why when K shows me the Christmas card resources she’s rather apologetic; “The only prescribed craft activity of the year, we don’t usually do this…” she tells me. First I must model writing the child’s name on a whiteboard for them to copy onto a slip of paper which will be pasted inside the card. Then I should direct them to remove their gloves and coat the fingers and most of the palm of one hand with ...