Natural England in partnership with the Department for Food and Rural Affairs, Public Health England, English Heritage and King’s College London launched a 2 year pilot to develop a national indicator for children’s access to the natural environment to help respond to these ambitions and challenges. This Project is part of Natural England’s Outdoor Learning Programme.
The aim of this pilot is to test the development and delivery of quantitative indicators of the scale and scope of children’s access to the natural environment.
The results from Year 1 are published in this report and, for the first time, begin to quantify the proportions of all children in England visiting natural environments at different frequencies (for example, weekly, monthly), who they are visiting with and what sorts of places they are visiting – for example the percentage of all children in England visiting particular types of sites and whether there are links between frequency of visiting and any demographic factors.