Greg Stalker - OLC
Media Isle of Man’s Tom Curphey spoke to the Outdoor Learning Centre Manager Greg Stalker to find out about the site and what the future holds at West Baldwin
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00:00I'm Greg Stalker, I'm the Head of Centre at the Outdoor Learning Centre.
00:02And Greg, we're here today and we're seeing what you've already done. It's been a lot of hard work
00:05obviously going into it. Tell us exactly what's happened here in the past 18 months.
00:10So the 18 months, we were given a vision to reopen what was the Outdoor Learning Centre,
00:17sorry, what is the Outdoor Learning Centre, and the brief was to create a space that is accessible
00:23and open to every child on the Isle of Man, and that's what we've tried to do. The layout of the
00:28centre is still quite similar, so this is still what was the assault course, it's now the newly
00:33rebuilt adventure course. We've got the problem solving field inside of the fence, we've got an
00:37orienteering course around the whole site, and a new kind of bushcraft and wilderness area behind
00:42you. So that's kind of what we've been working on, and you can see from today it's going down
00:49very well, and it's great to see young people using it. Absolutely, the kids seem to be enjoying
00:52themselves, and we've got a fantastic day for it as well. But this is kind of just the start,
00:55you were telling me, this isn't the finished product, there's a lot more work to go on.
00:58So yeah, this is kind of phase one, if you like, was creating these on-site activities.
01:03So there's a middle section at the centre, which is currently under redevelopment, so we're looking
01:09at several options there, potentially archery, climbing, caving, that kind of thing. So we're
01:13doing some reports on how much that's going to cost, and how we can pay for those things,
01:17but that's the next phase of the build. But from a programme perspective, like I say,
01:23every school will be able to access the centre from September. The primary schools will be a
01:28day of wilderness and of wildlife, but the work with the secondary schools will be slightly longer,
01:34and they'll come for kind of a 12-week programme, where we'll introduce them to a lot of different
01:38activities, but more importantly, a lot of skills. So we're looking at that wilderness
01:42and bushcraft type work, kind of fire, food, shelter, water, and carving and tools. And the
01:49idea is that they learn to do those crafts on-site, and then we take them on a journey,
01:54whether that's on foot, on a bike, on a paddleboard, we take the young people on a journey of wilderness,
01:59and we take them somewhere, even on the Isle of Man, quite a small place, you can still find pockets
02:03of untapped countryside, and we locate them in that space, and we get them to use the skills
02:10that they've learned to survive.