Regular time in the bush may do more than build environmental awareness: teachers at a Melbourne preschool reported improvements in children's behaviour, empathy and coping alongside their growing sustainable attitudes. Parents described children picking up litter, talking about the planet and forming attachments to particular trees over the same period.
Early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS) - child-centred learning that aims to build both environmental awareness and responsibility towards future generations - has been promoted as a way of shaping values at an age when children's development is highly malleable. The authors argue that the evidence base has been limited by small samples and a shortage of quantitative data, and that some earlier work has found ECEfS programmes to be superficial. This study set out to test whether one established programme produced measurable change in both environmental attitudes and social and emotional learning (SEL — the skills of empathy, self-regulation, relationships and coping).
Method
The study examined the Learning in Nature Program at an inner-city preschool in Melbourne, Australia. Children spend two hours in bushland, each paired with a designated partner; content covers seasonal change, local flora and fauna, habitats, environmental degradation and First Nations perspectives on the site. Participants were a convenience sample of 83 children across two cohorts (2021, n = 27; 2022, n = 56), attending one or two mornings a week, plus 17 parents. Teachers completed three standardised rating scales at two time points across roughly four months: the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, the Empathy Questionnaire, and the Children's Coping Scale. Parent questionnaires were analysed for themes.
Key findings
The study identified:
1. Significant decreases in peer problems, emotional problems, conduct problems and hyperactivity, with effects the authors describe as small.
2. Significant increases in prosocial behaviour and in empathy expressed as prosocial action — comforting a distressed peer, for example.
3. A significant increase in positive coping and decreases in both forms of negative coping, with the strongest effect observed for positive coping.
4. No significant change in two underlying empathy processes: emotional contagion (catching another's feeling) and attention to others' emotions. The authors suggest children may already have reached these developmental stages.
5. From parent responses, reports of increased environmental knowledge (5 parents), improved sustainable attitudes (5), sustainable behaviours (2), social-emotional gains (4), connection to nature (4) and learning about First Nations connections to Country (5).
The 2021 cohort showed greater gains than 2022. The authors offer two possible explanations: one 2021 teacher had designed the programme and had more delivery experience, and the 2022 cohort had spent longer in COVID-19 lockdown.
What this means for practice
The findings indicate that explicit environmental teaching combined with child-directed nature play may support both sustainability outcomes and wellbeing, which matters for educators justifying nature time against crowded curriculum demands. Notably, gains also occurred in 2022 with less experienced teachers, suggesting the programme does not depend on a specialist designer to deliver results — relevant where unfamiliarity is cited as a barrier to starting.
Return to Early-Childhood and Nature-Based Learning Collection
The Bottom Line
This mixed-methods study followed 83 children (average age around 4 years 4 months) at a single inner-city preschool in Melbourne, Australia, through the Learning in Nature Program (LNP), a two-hour weekly bush immersion built into the preschool curriculum. Teachers rated each child on standardised measures of behaviour, empathy and coping before and after the roughly four-month programme, and 17 parents answered open questions about changes they had noticed. The authors report statistically significant reductions in peer problems, emotional and conduct difficulties, hyperactivity and negative coping, alongside increases in prosocial behaviour and positive coping. Parents described children picking up litter, talking about the planet and forming attachments to particular trees. For practitioners, the study suggests that sustainability-focused nature programmes may deliver social-emotional benefits as well as environmental ones.