Global Perspectives on Outdoor Play: Lessons from Scotland and Australia

Photo credit: Robert Kennedy, Baltic Street Adventure Playground

Across Glasgow, Thrive Outdoors is supporting a range of innovative and diverse outdoor community play projects. Last month, our Learning and Development Lead, Henry Mathias, had the opportunity to share this work with Robyn Monro Miller, president of Play Australia and the International Play Association. They were also joined by Marguerite Hunter Blair OBE, the recently-retired CEO of Play Scotland. What followed was a rich exchange of ideas and a chance to reflect on how far play provision has come, and where it might go next. 

Given our entwined colonial past, it’s not surprising that Australia’s origin story for outdoor play shares much common history with the UK and Scotland. But, like the hall of mirrors in a traditional fairground, everything seems familiar but strangely different.

Play Australia traces its history back to the Guild of Play in 1914, when powerful female social engineers intervened to establish services for poor children neglected in the wake of the Gold Rush. This has a familiar ring, with the Macmillan sisters and other open-air kindergarten pioneers on their mission at this time to rescue children enduring industrial slums of Great Britain. Fast forwards to 1961 and Australia was a founding member of the International Play Association (IPA), with Scotland late to the party but both countries being leading IPA members for many years.

Open access Adventure Playgrounds on vacant urban sites were a big thing both here and in Australia. Some are still alive and kicking down under, with three in Victoria and three newly-established in Queensland. The free-spirited and anarchic culture of Adventure Playgrounds lives on in both our respective play movements, reflecting a tradition of independent campaigning for the rights of children on the margins of the mainstream.

Given this cultural legacy, I sense our default mode as being outsiders offering an alternative vision as well as provision. But, as we make serious progress – mainstreaming play into funded early learning and childcare programmes, curriculums, research and statutory policy and planning – is now perhaps a good time to reflect on some of the cultural baggage we carry?

We can still honour and indeed channel our rebellious elders from the 60s and 70s, at the same time as adapting to the current lived experiences of children and their parents post-Covid. Robyn, Marguerite and I spoke about the need “to see ourselves as others see us” and being able to nuance our, at times, self-righteous tone in order to make leaps and bounds forward. How about that classic Lady Allen Hurtwood line, “Better a broken bone than a broken spirit?”. Maybe it had the desired effect at the time, but surely does us no favours with families in today’s environment.

What a lot we can learn from our furthest away colleagues. As an example, at Thrive Outdoors, we’re currently developing a place-based or land-based pedagogical approach to our outdoor play, with walkshops exploring the flora, fauna, folklore and social history of a particular area. Naturally I wonder where the Koori Curriculum’s indigenous learning model, which embeds Aboriginal perspectives in early childhood education, might lead us in Scotland – creating our own framework that celebrates our Gaelic, Scots and Norse heritage. What might a Scottish pedagogy, one that draws on this rich legacy to share facts, vocabulary, stories, songs, music and poems about the natural world, look like?

In our increasingly fractured and polarised world, we as play professionals find ourselves in a fortunate yet responsible position. Outdoor play has the unusual ability to unify people across geographical, social, class and even political divides. Here in Scotland, for example, we’ve seen supoprt for the Schools (Residential Outdoor Education)(Scotland) Bill which will give all school pupils access to outdoor residential learning as part of the curriculum. As Robyn said, “play can be a multi-dimensional panacea for a range of issues”. Let’s make the most of it.