I Didn’t Leave Teaching. I Left an Outdated Idea of Learning!

I sometimes think about my old maths teacher, Mr Hamilton.

As a dyslexic kid, school often felt like a place where everybody else had been given a set of instructions that I’d somehow missed. I wasn’t stupid. I was curious, creative and full of ideas. But much of what happened in the classroom felt disconnected from the real world and even more disconnected from how I learned best.

One day, frustrated by yet another maths lesson, I asked Mr Hamilton why I needed to learn certain calculations.

His answer was immediate.

“You won’t always have a calculator in your pocket.”

At the time, I accepted it because he was the teacher and I was the pupil.

Now, every time I pull my smartphone from my pocket, I smile.

Not because he was a bad teacher. Far from it. He cared deeply about his pupils and wanted us to succeed.

But his answer perfectly captures the problem with education.

We are still preparing children for a world that no longer exists.

Today I carry a calculator in my pocket. I also carry a dictionary, an encyclopaedia, a map, a camera, a voice recorder and access to more information than entire libraries once contained.

The skills that have served me most throughout my life have not been my ability to memorise information.

They have been my ability to build relationships, solve problems, think creatively, adapt when things don’t go to plan and spot opportunities where others don’t.

In fact, while school was trying to teach me percentages through worksheets, I was far more interested in working out how much profit I could make from taking other children’s money to buy sweets from the ice cream van charging a higher price for ‘the service’

That was maths.

Real maths.

Applied maths.

Maths that mattered to me.

Looking back, I wasn’t struggling because I couldn’t learn.

I was struggling because the way I was being asked to learn didn’t always make sense to me.

Years later, as a Support for Learning teacher, I found myself working with children who reminded me of that younger version of myself. Children who were bright, capable and full of potential but who were increasingly being defined by what they couldn’t do rather than what they could.

And that was really where the journey towards Little Bugs and eventually Wild Bugs began.

When Paul and I opened our first outdoor nursery, we weren’t trying to create an alternative to mainstream education. We simply believed that children deserved more time outdoors, more opportunities to play, more freedom to explore and more chances to develop through meaningful experiences rather than adult-directed activities.

At the time, outdoor nurseries were still relatively uncommon in Scotland. Fast forward a few years and the sector has grown significantly. More and more practitioners, researchers and families are recognising what many of us have seen first hand for years: children thrive outdoors.

At Little Bugs we watched children arrive anxious and leave confident. We watched children who struggled to communicate find their voice. We watched children who found it difficult to regulate their emotions become calmer and more resilient. We watched children who were constantly being told to sit still finally find an environment where movement wasn’t something to be managed but something to be celebrated.

What we were really doing was early intervention.

Not intervention in the medical sense.

Intervention in the human sense.

Creating environments where children could flourish before they began to believe they couldn’t.

Over the years, hundreds of children came through our settings and the outcomes were remarkable. Yet what fascinated me most wasn’t what happened during their time with us. It was what happened afterwards.

As those children moved on to school, I began to notice a pattern.

Some continued to flourish, but others who had been confident, capable and deeply engaged learners suddenly started to struggle. Parents who had spent years celebrating their child’s growth found themselves attending meetings about behaviour, attention, attainment or support needs. The language surrounding the child changed, despite the child remaining fundamentally the same.

They were still the same child who had spent hours building dens, creating imaginary worlds, solving problems and making friends around a campfire.

The same child.

The only thing that had changed was the environment around them.

I often reflect on the later stages of my traditional teaching career. When I was working in Support for Learning and seeing the system from another perspective. I found myself sitting in meetings discussing children who were struggling to fit within the expectations of school. Increasingly, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were asking the wrong questions.

Rather than asking why a child was struggling in a particular environment, we seemed preoccupied with identifying what was wrong with the child.

That distinction matters.

Because if a child can thrive in one environment and struggle in another, perhaps the issue isn’t solely within the child. Perhaps the environment deserves closer examination too.

Much of my role involved referrals, assessments and meetings. Families often waited years for answers. By the time some children finally reached the top of waiting lists, many had already spent a significant part of their childhood believing they were somehow failing.

The diagnosis itself was rarely the problem. For many families, a diagnosis brought understanding, validation and access to support. What concerned me was what happened before that point.

Too many children were losing confidence in themselves as learners.

Too many were beginning to define themselves by what they couldn’t do rather than what they could.

Too many had already decided that learning simply wasn’t for them.

I often found myself wondering whether we had become so focused on identifying difficulties that we had forgotten to recognise strengths.

What if some of the children we were referring didn’t have learning difficulties at all?

What if they simply had learning differences?

A child who learns through movement is not broken.

A child who learns through practical experience is not deficient.

A child who needs nature, space and freedom to think is not a problem to be solved.

Yet we increasingly ask children to spend their days sitting under fluorescent lighting, navigating busy classrooms, completing worksheets and learning in ways that often bear little resemblance to how human beings naturally learn.

Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, famously wrote that “time in nature is not leisure time; it’s an essential investment in our children’s health.”

The science increasingly supports what many practitioners have known instinctively for years. Access to nature has been linked to improvements in children’s mental wellbeing, emotional regulation, concentration and cognitive development. Researchers studying Attention Restoration Theory have found that natural environments help restore attention and reduce mental fatigue. Occupational therapist Angela Hanscom has also highlighted the importance of movement, sensory experiences and unrestricted outdoor play in supporting healthy child development.

Yet somehow we have created a system where children spend more time looking at pictures of nature than actually being in it.

The more I reflected on this time in teaching, myself as the learner and of course the journey I had been in with Littlr Bugs, the more I realised that many of our educational assumptions were rooted in a world that no longer exists.

Many of our schools were designed during an industrial age when compliance, routine and standardisation made sense. Society needed workers who could follow instructions, complete repetitive tasks and fit neatly into systems.

But what exactly are we preparing children for now?

Artificial intelligence can already write reports, analyse information, solve complex calculations and generate content in seconds.

The jobs many of today’s children will do may not even exist yet.

The future will not reward people simply for remembering information.

It will reward people who can think critically, solve problems, collaborate with others, adapt to change and imagine solutions that don’t yet exist.

These are not skills that develop through compliance.

They develop through curiosity.

Through challenge.

Through creativity.

Through relationships.

Through real experiences.

Watch a group of children in a woodland and you’ll see mathematics, science, literacy, engineering, negotiation, leadership, ecology and risk assessment happening naturally. You’ll see children solving problems because the problem matters to them. You’ll see learning that has purpose.

That realisation was one of the reasons Wild Bugs came into existence.

Not because I wanted to leave teaching.

I didn’t.

Not because I believe schools are full of bad teachers.

Quite the opposite.

Teachers care deeply about children. I know because I was one.

The challenge is that they are being asked to do the impossible.

Parents become experts in one, two or three children.

Teachers are expected to know and meet the needs of twenty-five, thirty or sometimes even thirty-three children at once, while delivering curriculum, managing behaviour, assessing progress, supporting wellbeing and navigating an ever-growing range of needs.

The issue is not commitment.

The issue is capacity.

Wild Bugs was created to offer something different.

A place where relationships come first.

A place where children are known as individuals.

A place where a ratio of one adult to eight children allows us to genuinely understand who a child is, how they learn and what helps them thrive.

People are often surprised when I tell them that we use Curriculum for Excellence every day.

Perhaps that’s because many people associate learning with desks, classrooms and worksheets.

We don’t.

We use Curriculum for Excellence exactly as it was intended: as a framework for developing Successful Learners, Confident Individuals, Responsible Citizens and Effective Contributors.

The difference is that we don’t start with a benchmark.

We start with the child.

A child building a shelter is applying mathematics, science and problem-solving.

A group cooking over a fire are developing literacy, numeracy, health and wellbeing.

A child exploring biodiversity in a woodland is engaging with science in a way no textbook could ever replicate.

A child leading a project is becoming an Effective Contributor.

A child learning to manage risk is developing confidence and resilience.

The Experiences and Outcomes are everywhere when learning is meaningful.

Children don’t need to be forced into learning when learning feels relevant to their lives.

What we have discovered is that Wild Bugs isn’t for a particular type of child.

It isn’t only for children with additional support needs.

It isn’t only for children who are struggling in school.

It isn’t only for home-educating families.

It’s for children.

Because every child benefits from connection, challenge, responsibility, movement, belonging and meaningful experiences.

Some families use Wild Bugs as part of a flexi-schooling arrangement. Some use it alongside home education. Others simply want their children to experience a different way of learning.

What unites them is a belief that education should be flexible enough to meet the needs of children rather than expecting children to adapt to a rigid system.

The longer I spend working with children, the more convinced I become that the future belongs to those who ask questions, challenge assumptions and think differently.

The children who don’t always fit neatly into the boxes we create are often the ones who have the greatest potential to redesign them.

Wild Bugs was never about leaving education.

It was about holding on to everything I loved about teaching while letting go of an outdated idea of what learning should look like.

Because when we stop asking children to fit the environment and start creating environments that help children thrive, extraordinary things happen.

And after watching hundreds of children grow through Little Bugs and now Wild Bugs, I have come to believe something very simple:

The problem was never that children needed to change.

The question we should have been asking all along was whether we were brave enough to change the environment around them.