Lawson Foundation: An Environmental Scan of Outdoor and Land-Based Early Learning in Canada

The Lawson Foundation has released a comprehensive new environmental scan of outdoor and land-based early learning in Canada, and it names a gap the sector has felt for years.

Led by Drs. Beverlie Dietze (Mount Saint Vincent University), Kelsey Robson (Lakehead University) and Melanie Manitowabi (Kenjgewin Teg), the scan reviewed licensing regulations, early learning frameworks, standards of practice, and post-secondary ECE programs across all 13 provinces and territories. Its central finding is what the authors call a “four-way disconnect”:

Key findings

• Early learning frameworks endorse outdoor and land-based learning as central to quality.
• The jurisdictions with standards of practice do not identify outdoor or land-based competencies.
• Only about 7 percent of post-secondary programs include any outdoor or land-based courses.
• Licensing regulations still prioritize fencing, ground surfacing and line-of-sight supervision over pedagogical intent.

The consequences are real. Programs that operate primarily outdoors often cannot meet indoor facility requirements, which can shut them out of licensing altogether, and with it out of Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) funding, so families who choose these programs can be left without the same subsidies as families in conventional centres.

The report is especially pointed about risk. No Canadian jurisdiction has embedded a risk-benefit assessment framework into its licensing rules, despite an existing made-in-Canada toolkit, leaving hazard elimination as the regulatory default. It is equally clear about Indigenous land-based pedagogy: the jurisdictions with the strongest Indigenous content in their frameworks show the widest gap between what those frameworks affirm and what their regulations support.

The scan does not stop at diagnosis. It sets out four action pathways, system alignment, regulatory reform, framework development, and educator preparation, that need to move together rather than one at a time, and it points to international models from Washington State, Germany, Denmark and Scotland showing that regulatory adaptation for outdoor and land-based programs is achievable without weakening quality oversight. With the CWELCC rollout still unfolding, the authors frame this as a genuine window for reform, and a challenge to stop leaving outdoor and land-based learning, in their words, “encouraged in principle and unsupported in practice.”

Read more: Full Environmental Scan (PDF)  |  Summary (PDF)  |  Report page and jurisdiction summaries

Source: The Lawson Foundation, July 2026. Authored by Dr. Beverlie Dietze, Dr. Kelsey Robson and Dr. Melanie Manitowabi.