Councillors have backed plans to send 20 childcare workers on a fact-finding mission to Germany.
Yesterday’s education committee approved the proposals for the council staff to travel to the country in April and visit nurseries to investigate how children learn outdoors.
The visit is fully funded with a grant from the Erasmus programme and follows on from a previous five-day visit to Spain in October last year.
A grant of 83,000 Euros was awarded to the council to pay for the German venture.
Education convener John Wheeler said: “These visits will play a crucial part in our development of outdoor learning for our younger children as part of our ELC services expansion.
“There is a compelling argument to be made for the benefits of outdoor learning in terms of children’s health and development.
“It makes perfect sense to make use of these externally-funded training opportunities to help our practitioners provide the best provision possible to our young children and part of our ambitious ELC expansion roll-out which will have a strong outdoor learning component”.
“The Aberdeen group are sharing their experiences as part of a wider project called WIGLS (Working in Green Local Spaces), developed to support practitioners in outdoor practices across the city. In late autumn, 2020, they will also share their findings at a conference in Aberdeen. “
