May 17th – The Wonderful Wizard of Oz?
May 8, 2021
On May 17th 1900, L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was first published in the United States. May 17th 2021 approaches fast: schools will be able to do overnight trips once again. For residential outdoor centres it represents an unknown and fantastical place of promise and fear. The sector has needed courage, heart and intelligence to navigate the yellow-brick road to this date, but it’s unclear whether any ruby walking boots will click us back to Kansas. May 17th hangs in the air, pregnant, full of promise and foreboding, ripe and ready to burst.
While centres are well-equipped to ensure school bubbles do everything but, we’ll soon learn the specifics of the operating guidelines the Department for Education will bestow upon us for overnight trips. UK Outdoors and the STSSG produced a well-researched set of Covid-secure guidelines that we hope will form the basis for the guidance. It was put together by some of the most experienced people in the industry. Certainly, it will mean restricted numbers. For some it will be a lifeline, for others – business as usual. For yet others, it won’t work. So we wait, excited, nervous, hopeful, wary. It has a feeling akin to walking in the twilight, where the comforting soft glow of day’s end is balanced by its brooding potential for darkness.
Staff have been brought back to long-quiet centres and preparation has begun with keen-eyed determination. One-way systems, separate areas, new signage, hand gel and hand-wash, protocols and checks; there is, all of a sudden, a quiet and satisfying hum of activity and busy action after months of leaves blowing lazily across unimpressed and empty activity lines. Training has spluttered back into life, coughing out the rustiness of the past 12 months and polishing teams back into well-oiled and roaring machines. Metal work has been clinking and glinting in the sun as instructors set up and take down high-ropes rigs; the flick of arrows and the pock of hitting new, unblemished targets floats across fields and courtyards. Instructors’ laughter again pierces the morning air as surely as an Eagle’s cry, delighting in the freedom and fun of simply being outdoors, at work, alert. We wake tentatively, as hungry and curious about our new landscape as a slumbering bear from hibernation – and we hope, for now, that our long winter has passed.
But winter passing is no promise of a glorious summer. With no support package and having fallen into the legislative gaps between other sectors, we still need insurers to develop new kinds of indemnity, schools to book early and with confidence, centres to cling on to any bookings they can get and retain. Outdoor education is about resilience, confidence, new skills, survival: on May 17th we find out just how well we have been able to practise what we preach. Ultimately, we’re just ready to go back to our centres, to our fields and lakes and hills. We want to welcome people to these places and show them around. Because after 18 months in an alternative reality, there really is no place like home.