Can outdoor learning be part of the solution to unlocking school for more pupils and helping them reintegrate post-lockdown?

Local authorities in Scotland have been exploring whether outdoor learning could be part of the answer to achieving social distancing and minimising transmission of COVID-19 in schools (Brooks, 2020). Scientists and medical experts are increasingly confident that coronavirus spreads less easily outdoors due to better ventilation; whilst virus-laden particles may be able to travel tens of meters indoors where the virus is more stable (Morowaska and Cao, 2020), outside in the open air, breezes and air currents can quickly disperse plumes of viral particles (Sandhu, 2020). One research paper from the University of Hong Kong states that ‘the transmission of respiratory infections such as SARS-CoV-2 from the infected to the susceptible is an indoor phenomenon.’ (Qian et al., 2020, p. 4) These scientists studied coronavirus outbreaks in China which involved three or more cases. They identified 318 outbreaks, all of which took place in indoor environments. Of 1245 individual cases studied