Totnes Times: Could outdoor education be the solution to the youth mental health crisis?

Modern medicine is always looking for the next big discovery to change lives, yet we are missing out on the cheapest, easiest and quickest way to turn around the spiralling mental crisis affecting young people.

And that is outdoor education. Research shows that being out in nature makes children happy, and that unstructured, risky, nature-based play outdoors improves confidence and cognitive development.

Yet, despite this, the amount of time children spend outside has fallen by 50% in a single generation. Today, children often roam just 300m from their home. And in the most deprived parts of the country, a fifth of children never spend meaningful time outdoors.

This is not an issue just affecting those living in urban centres. In South Devon, there is a stark disparity between the abundance of nature and how often young people access it. I regularly hear of children who live just a couple of miles from our stunning beaches but have never been to them.

There are few buses to the beach and the parking costs are prohibitive for some. It is no wonder some young people in coastal communities feel the beach is for visitors and tourists, not for them.

What the collapse of outdoor time is doing to our children is plain to see. Just the other week, the Children’s Commissioner Rachel de Souza published a damning report, finding that 1 in 10 children received mental health referrals in 2024/25 – double the number from seven years ago.

As legislators, it is simply not good enough to stand by and allow these trends to continue. We have got to act and that is why last week I introduced my Outdoor Education Bill to parliament.

The bill has three main goals: requiring all children in primary and secondary education to spend a minimum of thirty minutes a day outdoors during school hours; requiring primary and secondary schools to provide a minimum of one lesson of teach a week outdoors; and requiring every child be offered at least one outdoor education experience during their primary and secondary school years.

There is not a subject on the curriculum that cannot be enhanced by outdoor learning. The Fibonacci sequence is seen in the petals of a flower, the scales of a pine cone and the seeds of a sunflower. English, science, music, poetry, drama and geography can all be enhanced by teaching outside.

None of the proposals contained within the Bill are particularly radical. In fact, if you look at the research, you will see each suggestion is rooted in what has been repeatedly shown to boost our children’s mental health and wellbeing.

Yet, I know some parents and teachers are nervous about increasing the amount of time children spend outdoors, either during or outside school hours. For me, this is simply a reflection of just how much the experience of being a child has changed in recent years.

We all remember an outdoor experience which shaped our childhood. Kids today just aren’t making those memories. And that is a loss which cannot be recovered when they grow up. Action is urgently needed and I will keep pushing to make it happen.