# Transcript

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MANDY TULLOCH: Health and wellbeing is teaching children how to be safe, to look after themselves, and to be healthy and happy for the rest of their lives.

HEATHER TIPPING: A lot of our lessons inside, especially health and wellbeing, they can feel quite synthetic inside, and outside is a really excellent place to make it a more natural experience.

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MANDY TULLOCH: During the afternoon, I take half a class worth of children out, and these are early stages and we go out every week throughout the year, and we use that as a support for health and wellbeing. So it may be that we are exploring, looking for different aspects of seasonal nature, or it may be talking about their feelings and how outside can help to support them and their health and wellbeing.

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In the work that we are doing here, by using green spaces, we are trying to support an individual’s health and wellbeing. And what we’re trying to achieve is that children are feeling calm and alert and in a position so that they can go on to learn and do all the good stuff at school. And you can sometimes just see the worry just fade away from them. They start giggling. A child who was inside, who seemed very sad or worried about things, is running along and is taking the initiative. So it’s a wonderful opportunity for children to have, to be out in green spaces.

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HEATHER TIPPING: Initially, I think it showed that some children just don’t get the opportunity to play, and so they found games very hard at the start of the year, winning and losing and setting rules and sticking to them. And they’ve really progressed with that.

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There was a girl in my class who was very quiet inside and wouldn’t put herself forward answering questions inside the classroom and the effect that the outside had on her was immediate, she would have really in-depth conversations, she would talk about her life experiences, she would volunteer for leadership roles, and sometimes she would be a bit feisty. And it’s nothing that I had seen from her inside. So it was really lovely to see a different side to her personality.

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It’s really built resilience in the children that I’ve had over the last couple of years. When I say to them, ‘We’re going out in almost all weathers’, you can see on their faces when it’s raining the, ‘Oh no’, but then they get outside 10 minutes and they don’t even notice. It’s also the feeling of accomplishment when they do something like climb a tree for the first time. And I don’t notice it on a day-to-day basis, but by the end of the year or the next year when I take on a new class, I can see that how far my previous class have come and that makes it worthwhile.

MANDY TULLOCH: A child rolling down a hill and that’s helping with their proprioception and their vestibular senses. This is helping them to feel their body and their awareness. And this ultimately has found out through research, is then leading to children being able to concentrate better in class. This will then go onto them having better learning and also ultimately being happier at school. So something as simple as rolling down a hill has massive benefits to each and every child.

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