Sharing the benefits of New Zealand’s great outdoors
Nateva is a key supporter of the Perry Outdoor Education Trust (POET), a unique community organisation which connects young people to the outdoors and provides access for schools, teachers and students to high quality outdoor education programmes.
Established almost a quarter of a century ago, POET started as a pilot programme for Ngāruawāhia High School, led by then-principal and current POET board member David Bradford. The programme was developed out of a concern that many high schools in the Waikato region lacked the funding, resources and health and safety support to provide quality outdoor education for their students.
POET manager Karen Singers says the aim was to support the school in providing a teacher-facilitated outdoor education experience that was going to be meaningful for students.
“Money was the biggest barrier then – and still is now – and with the growing complexity of health and safety requirements, many schools were just opting out of doing anything at all in the outdoors for their students,” says Karen.
The programme has grown on the back of strong local demand, to expand across the region and cater to a more diverse range of students and age-groups. The organisation is also preparing to run multi-school courses for students with potential who need further support to grow into leadership roles, and to offer outdoor experiences for young people who are frequently absent from school due to complex health needs.
While growing to meet new areas of need, the POET programme remains grounded in the principles of that initial pilot. These are based in research that reinforces that the outdoors is a great place to learn, build strong personal relationships and improve mental and physical wellbeing.
POET custom designs each experience in collaboration with the individual schools, with two specialist outdoor education coordinators working with teachers to ensure they can facilitate a programme that is appropriate to their curriculum.
Karen says a lot of the success of the programme is that flexibility to meet the needs of the school and the students.
“We also pride ourselves on being really lean,” says Karen. “We have a big store of equipment, clothes, bikes, tents, cooking equipment – everything you need so that a school can be under canvas in large numbers.”
Careful budgeting, and POET’s provision of a range of resources to reduce costs, ensures that the outdoor experiences can be shared by everyone – with the programme designed so a whole class or cohort can all participate.
“A lot of schools have user-pays for their experiences, and a whole lot of kids never get to go because they can’t pay. We work hard to ensure were not exposing kids to that – we make sure that all the kids get to go.”
“That’s a big part of what we do. As well as supporting schools around equipment, programme design and development, and operational support and field support, we also subsidise the costs for the kids.”
Karen says the support of Nateva is a key part of the service they are able to provide to schools.
“Its massive because the funding Nateva provides just gives us that flexibility to be responsive – especially when we face additional costs, which is the key reason that we can get kids into the outdoors.”
Karen says that flexibility is also a key part of POET’s long-term success.
“We know what works in schools and the schools that we work in are quite complex. It takes time to understand and respond to the needs of the schools – but you need to be able to do that if you are going to get kids into the outdoors, so they can get all the benefits that brings.”
