In recent years, there has been increasing concern about the mental health of children and young people. It is something I hear from schools, social work teams and parents. They are feeling the pressure, and it is significant. Across the UK and internationally, rates of reported anxiety, emotional distress, and difficulties with attention and regulation have risen (World Health Organization, 2021; NHS Digital, 2023).
In response, there has been growing interest in resilience and in approaches that may support mental wellbeing. Especially in approaches that are preventative rather than reactive. Outdoor learning is increasingly cited in this context, often framed as a potential way to support children’s emotional and psychological health. While there are benefits, we also need to remember that outdoor learning is not a silver bullet.
This blog explores the relationship between outdoor learning, resilience, and mental wellbeing, with a particular focus on the importance of curriculum-based outdoor learning. We draw on research from psychology, public health, and education. We explore how outdoor learning can be effective in supporting wellbeing when it is embedded within everyday teaching and learning. This is in contrast to outdoor learning being positioned as an add-on or intervention.
Mental health, wellbeing, and protective factors
Increased awareness and reporting have contributed to higher recorded rates of mental ill health among young people. Research consistently highlights the importance of protective factors in mitigating risk and supporting healthy development (Masten, 2014). Protective factors include stable relationships, opportunities for movement, a sense of belonging, manageable challenge, and environments that support emotional regulation. These are the basic building blocks, and if they are in place and strong, they help build a foundation to support people, meaning they may be less likely to be significantly impacted by poor mental health. That being said, it is important to note that even if a person has these protective factors, they may still have poor mental health.
Schools play a crucial role in providing these conditions, particularly for children who may experience adversity elsewhere. However, it is important to distinguish between mental health support and mental health treatment. Educational approaches, including outdoor learning, should not be positioned as substitutes for clinical intervention. They simply are not. Instead, their value lies in supporting the everyday development of skills and capacities associated with resilience and wellbeing.
Understanding resilience as a developmental process
Resilience is often misunderstood as an individual trait or an innate quality. However, recent research conceptualises resilience as a dynamic and developmental process, shaped by experience, relationships, and context (Ungar, 2011; Masten, 2014). This challenges the assumption that it is a trait or quality.
We know that resilience involves the ability to:
- regulate emotions and behaviour
- adapt to change and uncertainty
- solve problems
- recover following challenge or stress
- experience a sense of competence and agency
These capacities are not acquired through avoidance of difficulty, but through supported exposure to manageable challenge over time. Educational environments that provide opportunities for exploration, problem-solving, and reflection. Therefore, they play a significant role in resilience development.
Nature, outdoor experiences, and mental wellbeing
A growing body of research links time spent outdoors and in natural environments with positive outcomes for mental wellbeing. But let’s stop and think. How do you feel after time outdoors? For most people, the answer tends to be positive. Personally, I know I feel calmer, more centred and often like I have more energy. Studies have identified associations between exposure to nature and reduced stress, improved mood, enhanced attention, and improved emotional regulation (Bratman et al., 2019; Mygind et al., 2019).
Importantly, evidence suggests that active engagement with outdoor environments has greater benefits than passive exposure alone. Experiences that involve movement, sensory input, social interaction, and cognitive challenge appear particularly supportive of wellbeing (Kuo, 2015). If life feels a bit much, a donder in the woods helps. And, every big life challenge has seen me head to the Cairngorms. I have a walk here that makes me feel small and puts everything in perspective. It has an ancient Granny Pine and a gorgeous wee lochan with mountains all around. That walk is just what these studies notice. The movement, sensory input and challenge support my wellbeing.
This distinction is critical when considering the role of outdoor learning in schools.
Outdoor learning as an educational context
Outdoor learning differs from unstructured outdoor time or recreational exposure to nature. It involves intentional, planned learning experiences that take place in outdoor environments and are aligned with curricular aims. Even Forest School, which is child-led, has practitioners carefully plan sessions for their groups.
But all learning outdoors, whether it be Forest School or curriculum based, typically combines:
- physical movement
- sensory engagement
- real-world problem solving
- social collaboration
- unpredictability and change
This combination places a different set of demands on learners than indoor classroom environments, often requiring greater flexibility, self-regulation, and adaptability. These demands mirror many of the capacities associated with resilience.
The importance of curriculum-based outdoor learning
Research by Gemma Goldenberg and others highlights the importance of embedding outdoor learning within the curriculum rather than treating it as an occasional enrichment activity or intervention (Goldenberg, 2021).
When outdoor learning is:
- explicitly linked to curriculum outcomes
- planned and progressive
- part of everyday school practice
It becomes predictable, inclusive, and accessible to all learners. This predictability is particularly important for wellbeing, as consistent routines and expectations support emotional safety and regulation.
Curriculum-based outdoor learning also avoids positioning outdoor experiences as remedial or reserved for children experiencing difficulty. Instead, it frames learning outdoors as a normal and valued way of learning, supporting both academic and developmental outcomes simultaneously.
Outdoor learning, metaskills, and resilience
Curriculum-based outdoor learning naturally creates opportunities for learners to practise skills closely aligned with resilience. These include:
- Self-regulation: managing attention, emotion, and behaviour in a dynamic environment
- Problem-solving: responding to authentic challenges with tangible consequences
- Adaptability: working with variable conditions, materials, and outcomes
- Agency: making decisions, testing ideas, and experiencing cause and effect
- Social connection: collaborating, negotiating, and developing a sense of belonging
These skills are increasingly recognised as essential for learning, wellbeing, and future adaptability. Outdoor learning provides a context in which such metaskills can be developed authentically and repeatedly.
Supporting wellbeing without over-medicalising education
One of the strengths of curriculum-based outdoor learning is that it supports wellbeing without pathologising normal emotional experience. Learners are not required to articulate feelings before they are ready, nor are they singled out as needing intervention.
Instead, outdoor learning offers:
- opportunities for success through varied pathways
- space for movement and sensory regulation
- experiences of manageable challenge and recovery
- time for confidence to develop gradually
For many children, particularly those who struggle within highly structured indoor environments, this can act as a significant protective factor.
The pressure on schools to meet diverse and complex needs
Schools are increasingly expected to respond to a wide range of emotional, behavioural, and mental health needs, often in the absence of timely external support. When I meet with both teaching staff and management teams, they both frequently describe feeling responsible for identifying difficulties early, providing appropriate support, and ensuring no child is left behind, while also meeting curriculum, attainment, and accountability demands.
This pressure can create a difficult tension. On the one hand, schools are rightly committed to supporting children’s wellbeing. On the other, there is a growing risk that educational spaces become overburdened with responsibilities they were never designed to carry alone.
Research has highlighted the strain this places on school staff, with increased workload, emotional labour, and concern about meeting needs beyond their training or remit (Kidger et al., 2016). In this context, approaches to wellbeing that rely on additional programmes, specialist knowledge, or individualised intervention can inadvertently add to existing pressures.
Curriculum-based outdoor learning offers a different way forward.
Rather than requiring schools to do more, it supports schools to do differently, by embedding experiences that support regulation, connection, and resilience within everyday teaching and learning. Because outdoor learning is part of the curriculum, it does not rely on diagnosis, referral, or individual targeting. Instead, it creates conditions that benefit all learners while remaining firmly within an educational role.
This distinction is important. Outdoor learning does not ask teachers to become therapists or mental health practitioners. It is merely a tool that supports schools to create environments where many protective factors for wellbeing are already present, reducing pressure at the point of crisis, rather than responding only once difficulties have escalated.
Teacher mental health and system sustainability
Alongside growing concern for children and young people’s mental health, there is increasing recognition of a mental health and wellbeing crisis within the education workforce across the UK. Teaching unions and professional bodies in England, Scotland, and Wales have consistently reported rising levels of stress, burnout, and mental ill health among teachers, linked to workload, accountability pressures, and the increasing complexity of pupil needs (Education Support, 2022; EIS, 2023; NEU, 2023). Unfortunately, it is something that I see right across the UK (and hear of further afield as well).
In England, surveys conducted by Education Support have found that the majority of teachers report experiencing high levels of stress, with many considering leaving the profession due to workload and emotional strain (Education Support, 2022). Similar concerns have been raised by the National Education Union, which has repeatedly highlighted the unsustainable demands placed on teachers and school leaders (NEU, 2023). In Scotland, the Educational Institute of Scotland has raised parallel concerns, emphasising the cumulative impact of workload, system pressure, and unmet pupil needs on teacher wellbeing (EIS, 2023).
This context is critical. Schools cannot be expected to support children’s wellbeing effectively if the adults within them are themselves overwhelmed or depleted. Research has consistently demonstrated links between teacher wellbeing, classroom climate, pupil outcomes, and the sustainability of educational improvement efforts (Briner & Dewberry, 2007).
In this light, approaches to wellbeing that rely on additional programmes, paperwork, or emotional labour risk exacerbating existing pressures. What schools require are practices that support both pupils and staff without adding to workload or blurring professional boundaries.
Curriculum-based outdoor learning offers one such approach. When embedded within everyday teaching and learning, outdoor learning does not require teachers to take on therapeutic roles or additional responsibilities. Instead, it can support calmer learning environments, improved engagement, and more relational forms of pedagogy, factors that may reduce stress for staff as well as learners.
Outdoor learning should not be framed as a solution to teacher burnout. However, as part of a whole-school approach, it can contribute to more sustainable ways of working by aligning curriculum, pedagogy, and wellbeing, rather than treating them as competing priorities.
Implications for schools
Outdoor learning should not be viewed as a solution to the mental health challenges facing children and young people, nor as a substitute for appropriate specialist support. However, when embedded within curriculum and everyday practice, it can contribute meaningfully to a whole-school approach to wellbeing that supports both learners and staff.
By providing regular opportunities for movement, regulation, connection, and agency, curriculum-based outdoor learning helps create learning environments that are calmer, more engaging, and more responsive to diverse needs. These conditions support children to learn, cope, and adapt, while also reducing some of the pressures placed on teachers to manage wellbeing through additional programmes or individualised intervention alone.
Importantly, when outdoor learning is part of normal teaching practice, it does not require teachers to take on therapeutic roles or additional emotional labour. Instead, it offers a pedagogical approach that aligns curriculum, learning, and wellbeing, supporting sustainability within the system rather than adding further demands.
My Final Thoughts
As concerns about the mental health of children and young people continue to grow across the UK, educational responses must be evidence-informed, ethical, and realistic. Schools are operating under significant pressure, and teachers themselves are experiencing high levels of stress and burnout. Any approach to wellbeing must therefore consider the needs of both learners and the adults who support them.
Outdoor learning should not be framed as a therapeutic intervention or a quick fix. Its value lies in its role as a powerful educational context, one that supports learning, wellbeing, and resilience together, without over-medicalising education or extending teachers beyond their professional remit.
When outdoor learning is curriculum-based, consistent, and thoughtfully implemented, it supports the development of resilience-related capacities in young people while also contributing to more sustainable, humane ways of working within schools. In this way, outdoor learning becomes not an additional expectation, but part of how schools create the conditions in which both children and adults can learn and thrive.
References
Education Support. (2022).
Teacher wellbeing index 2022. London: Education Support Partnership.
Goldenberg, G. (2021).
Curriculum-based outdoor learning: Purpose, pedagogy and practice. [Conference paper / professional publication].
Masten, A. S. (2014).
Ordinary magic: Resilience in development. New York: Guilford Press.
National Education Union. (2023).
Addressing workload and burnout in education. London: NEU.
NHS Digital. (2023).
Mental Health of Children and Young People in England. London: NHS Digital.
World Health Organization. (2021).
Adolescent mental health. Geneva: WHO.
