Co-designing Queen's Park Primary School with pupils
Queen’s Park Primary School is located in Westminster, and falls into the top 20% most deprived areas in the country. 48% of pupils are eligible for Free School Meals (FSM), which is double the national average, and since Covid there has been a noticeable increase in the number of children with Special Educational Needs (SEN) and social/emotional/behavioural difficulties.
The school reported several barriers to greening their playground and integrating outdoor learning opportunities, including a lack of decent space suitable for engaging pupils, competing pressures on staff time and budget strains.
Healthy Playground Project
Trees for Cities reached out to support Queen’s Park Primary in revitalising their school site with the delivery of our Healthy Playground project. Working in partnership with children and schools, Healthy Playgrounds are urban playgrounds reimagined and redesigned, with the introduction of trees, forest gardens, food-growing, outside classrooms, woodland play areas, mini-forests and wildlife habitats.
Through our co-design process with key members of school staff, we solidified school aims of greening heavily concrete playground and implementing more opportunities for pupils to plant as part of their everyday school experience, creating a bespoke design that enhanced underutilised areas, whilst complementing current site usage.
Our Healthy Playground project transformed the school playground into a vibrant, green space, with high-quality, sustainable features to increase outdoor learning opportunities and mitigate climate-related risks. This includes installing green oak timber raised beds, repurposed oil barrel planters, and freshly dug ground for planting activities, a shade sail to provide more protection on the school grounds from high temperatures, and rain planters that are connected to the school building to collect water.
It was amazing that the Trees for Cities team were willing to show what they were doing to our young children with special needs. This helped them to understand the build and now those children are very keen to water the plants and not pick them. This is because they have watched all of the hard work go into it.
Melissa Royle, Head Teacher at Queen’s Park Primary School
With each school project, we deliver one year of educational activities to support with increased outdoor learning opportunities for pupils. We also provide teaching resources and skills sessions for staff to feel comfortable in using and sustaining the new project. Our engagement team joined the school gardening club for sessions where children learned to plant perennial herbs and sowed seeds including sunflowers, calendula, nasturtiums lettuce and peas. We ran an information session for staff in September to enhanced knowledge of the Healthy Playground and provide teaching resources to support with integrating wider teaching outside.
Since the implementation of the Healthy Playground, there has been a positive change in attitude amongst all pupils who have enjoyed being involved in planting and taking care of the garden. This has been particularly profound amongst the school’s youngest children with special education needs and disabilities (SEND).
It's an amazing opportunity for some of our youngest pupils with SEND to fully understand the process of planting, to watching plants grow and then produce food they can eat. They have now learnt how to look after the plants and are very involved in regular watering. It is also offering them a sensory experience outside of their classroom as herbs have been planted there
Melissa Royle, Head Teacher at Queen’s Park Primary School
The school even received a commendation certificate for Queen’s Park in Bloom 2024, showing the transformative impact the Healthy Playground project has made to the space!
Thank you
A huge thank you to Kusuma UK Trust and the London Community Foundation for their generous support in delivering the Healthy Playground project at Queen's Park Primary School. Their involvement has played a vital role in enriching the educational experiences for children in London by increasing everyday access to nature and embedding outdoor learning into the heart of the school life.
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