The Outdoor Primary School, Learning from the living world…

In September 2025 TOPS, The Outdoor Primary School in Greystones, Co Wicklow will open its doors on its first term. Its website describes it as

……a pioneering new school in Ireland that will cover the skills of the Irish National Curriculum through inquiry-based learning whilst being immersed in the natural world. Students will help direct their learning through projects where they are encouraged to question and explore the world around them, whilst also learning core skills in Literacy and Mathematics. Knowledge and application of practical and nature-based skills will be a key part of the curriculum, alongside our core wellbeing strand. We aim to empower our students as curious, resilient, inclusive, problem solvers who are confident digital and global citizens in a rapidly changing future.
We will be opening in September 2025 with our first cohort of students that would be Junior and Senior Infant, and First Class ages, and will then expand organically as our students grow. Our campus will be in the beautiful 52-acres of the SEK International School grounds on Windgates Hill in Greystones, and therefore we will be able to have full use of this stunning area as our classroom!

The School is a private venture that will not receive funding from the Department of Education, and accordingly it will need to be self-funded by parents. Their web-page also states

We are a Social Enterprise (registered CLG company) and so have no shareholders to take any profits!

The School defines the three strands of its Curriculium

• Nature: We learn about nature, in nature, and through nature.
• Nurture: We are mindful of our actions and take care of ourselves, each other and our planet.
• Knowledge: We notice, we wonder, we are active in finding answers to our questions.

Outdoor schooling has a significant radical pedigree in historical Irish education through the Hedge Schools of the eighteenth century which were an informal – and illegal – response to the penal laws that ensured that the children of non-conforming faiths, (Catholics, Presbyterians and other Dissenting sects) received an education outside of a system where the established Church of Ireland monopolised in law the education of the young. While much of this education concentrated on literacy and numeracy, a significant number of hedge schoolmasters aspired to a very high level of cultural instruction. One MP at Westminster, discussing an Irish education bill, dryly remarked ‘I do not wish to see children [in Ireland] educated like the inhabitants [of Munster], where the young peasants of Kerry run about in rags with a Cicero or Virgil under their arms”.
The May 1825 Report of the Commissioners of Education in Ireland criticised what it saw as the excessive education of “ordinary people”, with the dangers this presented for national stability. It concluded that

..the hedge schools were not keeping their pupils on the straight and narrow but were instead inculcating sedition and were involved in the very anti-Puritanical act of moral adventure. The schools ‘were very frequently of an objectionable character’, ‘whence it frequently happens, that instead of being improved by religious and moral instructions, their minds are corrupted … to incite the lawless and profligate adventure, to cherish superstition, or to lead to dissension or disloyalty’.

The Outdoor Primary School in Greystones offers another, very different kind of “sedition”. By bringing children back into the natural world to learn “about nature, in nature and through nature” it reminds them as they grow to adulthood that they are not simply being educated to become a denaturised part of the Irish economic miracle, living only to earn and spend, but that they are a living and interactive being in a complex environment, inevitably involved in a manner that will nurture or the harm other animal and vegetable lives, functioning in an annual cycle of growth and retreat that mirrors the trajectory of our own lives and whose annual repetition convinced our ancestors that this life was only a fragment of a greater pattern of impersonal continuing beyond any single life.

January 1916, Patrick Pearse issued a pamphlet on Irish Education, The Murder Machine,

One of the most terrible things about the English education system in Ireland is its ruthlessness. I know no image for that ruthlessness in the natural order. The ruthlessness of a wild beast has in it a certain mercy—it slays. It has in it a certain grandeur of animal force. But this ruthlessness is literally without pity and without passion. It is cold and mechanical, like the ruthlessness of an immensely powerful engine. A machine vast, complicated, with a multitude of far-reaching arms, with many ponderous presses, carrying out mysterious and long-drawn processes of shaping and moulding, is the true image of the Irish education system. It grinds night and day; it obeys immutable and predetermined laws; it is as devoid of
understanding, of sympathy, of imagination, as is any other piece of machinery that performs an appointed task. Into it is fed all the raw human material in Ireland; it seizes upon it inexorably and rends and compresses and re-moulds; and what it cannot refashion after the regulation pattern it ejects with all likeness of its former self crushed from it, a bruised and shapeless thing, thereafter accounted waste.

Our common parlance has become impressed with the conception of education as some sort of manufacturing process. Our children are the ‘raw material’; we desiderate for their education ‘modern methods’ which must be efficient but cheap; we send them to Clongowes to be ‘finished’; when finished they are ‘turned out’; specialists ‘grind’ them for the English Civil Service and the so-called liberal professions; in each of our great colleges there is a department known as the ‘scrap-heap’, though officially called the Fourth Preparatory—the limbo to which the debris ejected by the machine is relegated. The stuff there is either too hard or too soft to be moulded to the pattern required by the Civil Service

Today the modern version of this system continues across modern Ireland little different in its results to what Pearse was describing: the inevitable demand for workers as units of production is inevitably something common to any modern centralised society. This courageous reminder at Greystones of who and what we really are and of the beauty we live indifferent to, which takes its children to learn from an enquiry based encounter with the living world offers an alternative, which will imaginatively combine the requirements of the National Curriculum with nature itself.