Jenny's story

A key part of our values at Alfresco Learning is ensuring that children everywhere get to access learning in a way that is meaningful for them.

This, combined with them having opportunities to experience nature and feel the benefits of spending time outdoors in their everyday life at school, is one of our core reasons for starting this company.

Upon beginning my own outdoor teaching practice, I recognised that these benefits go much further than just their academic progress. One of the things I always strived for in my years in the classroom was forming and developing positive class relationships. This was something that when working with children with challenging behaviours, no matter the strategies that were used in class to support, I sometimes found tricky to fully achieve. Introducing curriculum outdoor learning to these children was the only way I found to truly connect with my whole class, forming meaningful bonds over their favourite things about nature, and sharing in their achievements when creating something practically from natural materials to demonstrate their knowledge. And the fact that we were also covering the objectives we needed to while this was happening was a huge bonus.

In these last few years, I’m amazed at how many children we’ve already impacted through our combined offerings of children’s workshops, online resources and staff training. Reflecting on our impact report for last year, my highlight has been meeting teachers and seniors leaders up and down the country through delivering our training days and training courses and supporting them in taking an estimated 6400 children outdoors as part of their everyday lessons for the years to come.

Our success so far only fuels our passion and drives us forward to achieving our vision of making a change in primary education and enabling children all over the UK to discover a love of the outdoors and learning through a new way of teaching.