Speech: Supporting outdoor and online education
Yesterday I spoke in a Westminster Hall debate about “Improving the education system after the covid-19 outbreak.”
I focussed on two areas in particular: ensuring that young people are equipped with the tools they need to navigate the world online and engage with it safely, and support for the outdoor education sector.
These two areas, though quite different, provide essential life skills for our young people and I pressed the Minister to support both.
You can read the full text below.
Thank you Miss Rees and thank you and congratulations to my hon friend the Member for the Isle of Wight for securing this important debate.
I’d like to concentrate the time I have on two things in this debate. On the face of it they are quite different, but I believe that actually they are related and speak to two of the major challenges that we face in education post-pandemic.
We’ve long known it to be the case, but the pandemic has emphasised it: education isn’t just about those tangible outputs like exams. It’s about the whole self - and preparing young people for the world. Often it is measured by the absence of things which only become tangible when they go wrong.
We are seeing the fruit of that dropping from the tree now: lost learning, young people with deep mental health concerns, issues with socialising, and an increase in anxiety. For some, perhaps even many, being away from formalised school during this crisis has left deep scars which we must now rapidly address.
The pandemic has also taught us some lessons about ourselves. In my constituency of Barrow & Furness we have suffered disproportionately poor outcomes from COVID due to underlying health conditions. We have also seen young people becoming even more reliant on devices and social media for schooling and friendship. We have to ask ourselves now how we can learn from these things and change them for the better.
I don’t for a second believe that we can put the genie back in the bottle on using the internet - and nor should we - but we can challenge ourselves to ensure that this fantastic tool is used better.
And similarly we can re-emphasise the importance of outdoor education and start to head off some of those issues now which will impact young people later in life.
Coming first to online skills and political literacy. We're in a time where, like it or lump it, politics is everywhere and politicians have made a disproportionate number of decisions about how people go about their lives, earn a living, or learn.
So interest - and perhaps frustration with - politics is at an all time high. But are we equipping young people with the skills they need to engage and to see the wood for the trees?
In 2018, the National Literacy Foundation found that only 2% of children in the UK had the skills required to understand whether a piece of information is real or fake. If the last year has shown us anything, it is that misinformation and low levels of media literacy are posing serious threats to societies around the globe.
From public health and vaccine misinformation, to the undermining of faith in democracy and the events in the US in January, the impact of this problem is widespread.
It has been common to speak of a “crisis in democracy” for years, but the last 12 months have brought this into sharp focus. Our education system is at risk of being out of date, and we must ensure that the resources are there to prepare students for life in a 21st Century democracy.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought challenges most of us couldn't imagine a little over a year ago, and it is certain that the education system, and teachers, have been hit incredibly hard by the challenges this virus poses and have more than risen to the challenge.
But, with this adversity, there also comes great opportunity, an opportunity to open up conversations, such as this, about how we can improve as we rebuild.
I'd also like to touch briefly on outdoor education as a subject. In Cumbria we are blessed with many excellent centres and I greatly enjoyed meeting the team at Kepplewray recently. But that sector is on its knees.
Outdoor education is not merely about exercise or getting outdoors - it is about teaching valuable life skills - teamwork, leadership, resilience and communication being but a few.
Outdoor education is already a vital part of the British education system. Without it, schools, children and communities will permanently lose important, formative educational experiences.
If we are looking to build back to a better education system after this pandemic, we must look to not just protect this crucial sector but utilise it more to head off some of those underlying issues which I mentioned earlier.
We owe it to the next generation to equip them with the tools they need to navigate the world around them, whether online or outdoor. The pandemic provides an opportunity and I very much hope that that the Minister and his team will seize it.
