Not Just a School Pet: Why Teaching Children Where Their Food Comes from Is Important
Growing up in a rural part of the UK, I have always taken for granted the unlimited access I had to the agricultural land that surrounded my home. The schools local to me often linked education with outdoor learning, and the majority of pupils had easy access to locally farmed goods, and at least some knowledge of where their food came from.
In urban parts of the UK the picture is vastly different, and a survey last year revealed that a shocking number of children were largely oblivious as to where their food comes from; with 1 in 5 children not even knowing that pigs produce bacon.
With this in mind, many schools are now developing farming programmes to help educate the UK’s children in farming practice and food produce. The School Farms Network (SFN), set up to help and advise schools with farms, has revealed there are now more than 110 school farms in the UK. A huge increase since the SFN was set up in 2004, and a movement that has even gained recognition and approval from Prince Charles.
From these newly built school farms, there has been encouraging progress and even surprising revelations on how it can affect pupil behaviour and attendance. The Natural Connections Demonstrations Project (2012–2016) released a report that discovered learning outside in a natural environment (LINE) had a 95% positive impact on pupil enjoyment and 85% positive impact on pupil behaviour. It also attributed a 92% positive impact on pupil health and wellbeing and 57% positive impact on pupil attainment. The report also discovered similar positive impacts on the teaching staff.
These improvements to pupils and teachers alike are often noted by individual schools who have undertaken farming projects.
A famous example is the San Sior primary school in Wales, where a project starting with 6 chickens led to a small farming business with 87 breeding hens producing thousands of eggs yearly for the school to package and sell locally. The pupils are actively involved in the care of the hens, picking eggs and helping design the packaging for sales. This has not only provided the local community with fresh free-range eggs, but it has also taught the pupils valuable lessons in food production and business practices.
Another case would be the farm at Chipping Campden School in Gloucestershire, run by Geoff Carr, who is also the current chair of SFN. The idea was to create a farm that would cater for students interested in agricultural and land-based industries, thus creating a more varied opportunity base for careers. This highly successful farm entails five paddocks for livestock, allotments and a polytunnel for crops, and a huge three-acre orchard for apple production. The apples are even plenty enough for the students to create apple juice for local sale, thus enhancing their entrepreneurial abilities and enabling students to value local produce first hand.
These examples are but a few of the types of projects we see around the UK in farms. Of course, it is easier for some schools, particularly those in rural areas, to undertake such programmes. The lack of land and resources in urban schools certainly does make things more difficult, but farming education is still possible.
Stephen Ritz, a teacher from a deprived school in the Bronx, New York, began the revolutionary project Green Bronx Machine, which aimed to encourage other schools in the USA to initiate their own farming programmes and create awareness amongst children on topics like healthy eating and sustainable environmental practice. The project is hugely successful, and Stephen’s vision has reached people globally, particularly as he has shown that food growth is possible in urban environments. To counter the issues of lack of space and land, he used vertical planting systems around the school, named “edible walls”, for the children to help grow vegetables. He noticed that as the project formed, the attendance of the children in school increased to a huge 43% to 93%, as pupils took more interest in caring for their plants.
This story of a dysfunctional high school becoming the base of such a hugely successful project is incredibly encouraging and proves that giving pupils the responsibility of looking after living things can greatly improve attendance and even the academic achievements of these pupils.
For schools in the UK, many could look to Stephen Ritz for inspiration on how to develop their own farming projects, or perhaps even just start with school trips to farms to help educate children about where food comes from. We are incredibly lucky to have a successful and diverse agricultural heritage in the UK and it should be celebrated and supported, and this begins with the education of our children.
If you have read this blog post and feel inspired to start a new project with the children in your class or even at home, then check out our Pinterest board, Green Fingers.
You will find plenty on here to get you started! Let us know how you get on…
