Bulwell EAZ is a partnership of six primary schools and one secondary, which runs a progressive series of camping residentials. These start in Year 2, with a one night residential at Wollaton Hall. Learn more about the Bulwell EAZ programme here.

The following case studies are from schools outside the Learning Away programme, and have been sourced by Gail Ryder Richardson of Outdoor Matters:

Dimples Nursery

Child First Nursery Northampton

By kind permission of Nursery World magazine, Away Days

Throughout this resource pack, we have signposted downloadable templates and activities to help you and your colleagues think through how to approach planning a residential with young children. The full suite is collected here:

Who Benefits?

The Radar graph – initial planning tool

Identifying risks and challenges

Identifying risks and challenges – worked examples

Short medium and long term planning

• The Young Children’s Voices Network (YCVN) is a national project promoting listening within the early years. The network supports local authorities in developing good practice in listening to young children, so that young children’s views may inform policy and improve early childhood services.
• Participation Works is a partnership of six national children’s and young people’s agencies. It enables organisations to effectively involve children and young people in the development, delivery and evaluation of services that affect their lives. The site contains an early years topic with specific information on listening to young children, developed by the Early Childhood Unit at NCB.
• Outdoor Matters provides consultancy, training and advice to schools and settings wanting to make effective use of their outdoor space for young children’s play learning and development.
• The Outdoor Education Advisers’ Panel provides a forum for sharing and developing good practices in outdoor learning and learning beyond the classroom. Their ‘National Guidance’ website includes valuable information about risk, planning, safeguarding and consent.
• The Health and Safety Executive is an excellent source of sensible, measured and reassuring advice.
• Explore how Dodford Farm prepares schools, settings and groups for residential and day visits to the farm.

The material signposted below provides a range of information that will help you ‘make the case’ for residentials to school leadership, colleagues, and parents, and consider in more depth what you need to take into account when planning these experiences.

• Starting with Choice: Inclusive strategies for consulting young children. Dickins, M; Emerson, S; Gordon Smith, P. 2004 Save the Children.
• Listening to Young Children. Lancaster, YP; Kirby, P. 2010 2^nd edition Open University Press.
• Can you hear me? The right of young children to participate in decisions affecting them. Lansdown; Gerison. 2005 Working Papers in Early Childhood Development; The Hague: Bernard van Leer Foundation.
• Respectful Educators, Capable Learners: Children’s rights and early education. Nutbrown, C (ed). 1996 Paul Chapman.
• How to Build a Culture of Participation. Young, J. 2009 NCB for Participation Works.
• Save the Children toolkit for monitoring and evaluating children’s participation.

These resources include templates created specifically for early years settings as well as generic templates created using source material gathered from the Learning Away partnership schools. You may need to adapt the ‘generic’ resources slightly to suit your specific circumstances.

Young children’s voice – worksheet for children to use

Parental permission form for residentials

Risk benefit overview and assessment

Brilliant residentials: kit list

Top tips for early years residentials