Outdoor Education

Al Pinkerton Excerpts

Wednesday 11th June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron]

Yes to all those things. It is important to recognise that if we give people a sense of excitement of being in the outdoors, we open their imagination to making those sorts of choices in their studies and careers and later in their private life.

I am grateful to the outdoor education professionals who share their expertise with me regularly. They identify the barriers to young people accessing outdoor education, which include the steady erosion of school budgets. Outdoor education is seen as a nice add-on, but not essential, so it gets downgraded or dropped altogether to save money. Schools either do not do outdoor education visits at all or they reduce them from week-long to two-day affairs, with worse outcomes as a consequence.

There is also a culture of risk aversion that infects schools, teacher training institutions and society as a whole. Over the last couple of generations, we have sought to protect our children from danger and the unpredictable to such an extent that we have perhaps done them greater harm by denying them experiences that would have given them resilience, wisdom and better mental and physical health.

Over my years as the Member of Parliament for Westmorland and Lonsdale, I have seen trends in the issues that local people seek my help with at my surgeries, on the doorsteps and via my inbox. The issue that has grown most in volume is the utter tragedy of worsening mental health among our young people. I will continue to fight for every one of those young people and for their loving but often terrified families to get the care they need through mental health services, but why can we not choose to do something radical today that will reduce the number of people suffering mental ill health in the first place?

The outdoors is the antidote to many of our ills. Time on outdoor residentials pulls us out of our comfort zone. It makes us rely on others and experience the scary wonder of being relied upon by others. It teaches us that we can do things we thought were impossible. It nurtures an ability to solve problems and to rise above the panic that freezes us when crises hit. It builds relationships and the capacity to form friendships, skills that are transferable and, above all, the resilience to help us cope with the stuff that life will chuck at us.

[Dr Al Pinkerton (Surrey Heath) (LD)]

My hon. Friend’s rich evocation of outdoor education reminds me to reflect on my own time doing things like the Duke of Edinburgh’s award. Although Surrey Heath might not have the soaring topographies of his constituency, what we do have is extraordinary outdoor education provision such as Briars Field forest school, which provides vital outdoor education, particularly for young children with special educational needs who otherwise could not access mainstream classrooms. Will my hon. Friend join me in paying tribute to those offerings that provide a genuine alternative to the classroom and profoundly change young people’s mental health?

[Tim Farron]

Absolutely. That builds on what I am saying. When it comes to poor mental health, it feels like we are figuratively fishing struggling people out of water, when perhaps what we really need to do is build their resilience so that they do not fall in in the first place. Ironically, of course, we do that in part by pushing people into the water—after an entirely appropriate risk assessment, of course.

Education and policy of successive Governments has failed to prioritise outdoor education to the extent that it has become for many a nice luxury at best, rather than the essential that it ought to be.