Climate adaptive school grounds: a new frontier
Matt Robinson, Learning through Landscapes

As our climate changes, so our approach to the outdoor areas of the learning estate has to also adapt. Our school grounds now also need to shelter our children, protect our building, and become ‘living laboratories’ for climate change education. Matt will share inspiration from Europe and sharing learning from Learning through Landscape’s climate change education projects across the UK.

This session explores technical issues in creating climate adaptive school grounds, how partnering with learners and teachers is central to any development, and directs us towards possible new sources of funding from outwith education budgets.

Blue Green Infrastructure as a tool for Play and Learning Outside
Kevin Jones, erz

The need to deliver biodiversity net gain and climate change mitigation brought about by NPF4 is an opportunity to reimagine school grounds. Bringing a nature-based and systems led approach to school ground design greatly enhances the learning environment whilst ensuring that school design teams are delivering on policy and planning legislation. The Building with Nature accreditation is a design standard that can be used to ensure an integrated approach to water management, wildlife and habitat enhancement and placemaking. When combined with imagination and lively educational design the results demonstrate that climate change mitigation and biodiversity net gain policies can be a positive thing for our school communities. Case studies include the new Trinity Academy Sports Centre (CEC, Merrylee Primary School Urban Jungle (GCC) and Frogston Primary School (CEC).