Yurt School in Broughton to create permanent outdoor classroom

Yurt School, part of the project Wilding at Hobkin Ground in Broughton, is a group of home educators with children ranging from three to fourteen years old from Millom, Barrow and Ulverston families.

The school has 19 children across eight families which come once a week on a Wednesday. Every week children vote on a project they would like to run and then for a full month they study it.

At home, the families, who are former or current teachers, look into it in more detail from that particular topic in that week.

They are hoping to raise £1,000 for a permanent outdoor classroom space to help support their current families and to allow access for more families to join them under shelter this coming autumn.

Children with their parents doing activities in a river. (Image: Megan Johnson)

Megan Johnson, co-founder of Yurt School, said: "We have become quite important in the home education community - our numbers have grown in the community. We are looking for an outside classroom which will enable us to split the group and that will facilitate the Yurt School.

"The children need to be studying outside in all seasons so they feel fully connected to the world they are living in and that learning happens through living it does not just happen inside the four walls of a classroom.

"The money raised will help towards purchasing materials for levelling the ground and drainage, a safe pathway, structural materials and a new fire pit." 

They have a 22-foot yurt on four acres of land - two acres of that is a woodland that the children can access during the day. 

Children paiting outside. (Image: Megan Johnson)Megan explained their community home education is not 'home education vs school' and that they have had children who have abandoned traditional schools and decided to invest in home education.

She said: "We always believe the school system as it stands needs improvement with more outdoors and more autonomy for the children needed. But the main reason is that we can, and we really want, to spend that time as a family.

"Sending a child into a building and allowing them out just for breaks is not the way we are meant to live. Children need to be out by the trees, rolling in the grass, playing in rivers and they can be learning at the same time with that. I think the lesson should be built around access to the outside, not having lessons and then allowing access to the outside."

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