Outdoor Education - A Growth Industry

Once upon a time, your average secondary-school camp involved boarding a bus with a few days’ clothes and a sleeping bag, taking off – with the two teachers who drew the short straws – for a barely liveable old farmhouse or camping ground, and arriving home a few days later with little you as student could quantify as having been gained from the experience except a pile of dirty clothes.

Many of the staff members still teaching in Australian schools will remember those days – with fondness, horror, or something of both.

But there’s little resemblance between those adventures and the adventures now offered as part of the outdoor education curriculum in many states, and in many schools. Now, schools send their senior students to purpose-built facilities with full-time staff trained to offer a 24-hour program of activities designed to reflect the philosophical and humanistic guidelines of a 21st-century Western education.

Scott Polley is a lecturer in the School of Health Sciences at the University of SA; with a background in nursing and physical education he completed a Master of Education (Outdoor Education) from La Trobe University and he now co-ordinates UniSA’s outdoor education program. He says the place of outdoor education in the secondary-school curriculum has changed from “adding 1+ 1” to a subject area that produces students who can work in groups, solve problems, critically analyse aspects of society,” and examine their own identities.

“It’s about learning about the environment, learning about themselves and leadership, and, I guess, taking self-reliant journeys under the supervision of teachers,” Polley says.

Yet within the broad philosophies behind contemporary education ideals, there exists a wide variety in what is offered as outdoor education in Australian schools. Part of that is due to the curriculum offered by each state; Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory include as senior-school subjects “outdoor education” or “outdoor and environmental studies”, while other states offer related subjects.

With peers including Peter Martin of La Trobe University, Polley in 1999 conducted a survey of SA and Victorian schools, attempting to discern “what was being done” in outdoor education at that time.

They found that about 85 per cent SA schools, for instance, offered “some level of outdoor education”, and that the most common way was through the school’s physical education program. In addition, about 60 per cent of senior-school physical education included outdoor education as a component.

Yet even within that one state, the offerings varied. In city-based government schools, outdoor education was, he says, “in decline or static”. In city-based non-Catholic schools, outdoor ed was “growing”, yet in the city Catholic schools, it “didn’t seem to be going anywhere”.

In the government schools outside the metropolitan area, however, outdoor education was growing, and obviously so. And the reasons – in every case – had a lot to do with the staff.

“The one thing we did find made the most difference to what outdoor education was offered in schools was the teachers,” Polley says. “If the teachers are enthusiastic, that’s the factor that’s going to most influence the outdoor education offerings in a particular school – closely followed by the principal, and the importance he or she places on it.

“At one end of the spectrum you have schools that embeds ideas of adventure, learning and the environment right through the curriculum, and at the other end are those that basically say, ‘why do we have to send kids outdoors?’

“But broadly, I’d suggest, support is growing rather than reducing. And one indicator of that is the number of graduates in jobs. I’m often getting calls from people looking for graduates – for jobs in eco-tourism, in private outdoor-education companies, in schools. When I did my course there were a limited number of people with an outdoor-ed background; now there are a lot more, yet there’s still a lot more demand. That’s the best guide I can give that things are still growing.”

So in schools where teachers were older, or trained when more specific outdoor education programs were unavailable, it was less likely that the importance of outdoor education would be emphasised. “Teachers are getting older in the city,” says Polley, “and so are becoming more reluctant to do it.” It’s to the country, he points out, that recent teaching graduates find their first positions.

When asked what were the reasons for “offering or not offering” outdoor education, the most commonly mentioned factors among teachers and principals were the age of the teachers, the lack of flexibility among staff and the time away from school.

The fear of litigation – which the researchers had expected to be a major concern at a time of highly publicised adventure accidents and related insurance problems – was not widely nominated as a major factor. “Generally, the response was, ‘we’re not offering it because of staffing issues’,” Polley says.

It’s possibly not surprising, then, that Polley says the most significant change in outdoor education in recent years is the growing influence of the private providers of outdoor education – those companies sub-contracted by schools to take responsibility for providing the school’s outdoor education programs. More and more schools are choosing that option, Polley says, largely due to the problems it alleviates in terms of staffing, specialist qualifications, equipment and other costs.

Yet Polley says the growth in the private providers – both in numbers and in the size of individual companies – did not seem to have occurred at the expense of physical-education teaching jobs in schools.