Bringing the outdoors in

The benefits of a week at Ardroy, near Lochgoilhead in Argyll, are clear to her head teacher, Jane Holmes, who has brought classes here for four years. “What Ardroy has that is different to other providers is that it’s an outdoor education centre,” she says, emphasising the education. “It focuses very much on the educational aspects, particularly through Curriculum for Excellence.”

The Auchtermuchty school trip to Ardroy nearly didn’t happen. Earlier this year Fife Council, which ran Ardroy, withdrew its £290,000-a-year funding. The council could no longer afford the centre. Despite a campaign from parents, Ardroy staff were made redundant in July and the place was shut.

By then, however, a 71 year-old Dunoon-based businessman had decided to save Ardroy, and was negotiating with Fife Council. George Bruce read about the closure in his local paper. Members of his family had worked there, and Mr Bruce had given business advice to a previous head of the centre.

“We believed in Ardroy and what it could do,” he says, and he put together a team to find a formula to keep Ardroy open.

He says his plans to run the centre as a social enterprise were greeted with scepticism by Fife Council. “They didn’t believe it could be kept open,” he says, “they had spent five years trying and had not been able to. So they weren’t making it easy to begin with. Then they realised we were serious.”

Eventually Fife agreed to lease the team the centre for a peppercorn rent for five years, but the rest – keeping schools on board, bringing staff back, and making it pay – was down to Mr Bruce and his team.

Last week the centre reopened and the 17 pupils and two staff from Auchtermuchty were its first paying customers.

Many schools kept their Ardroy bookings when they heard of Mr Bruce’s initiative, and others have come back. Now 80% of former customers are on the books for the next two years.

But now Mr Bruce and his team have to do what Fife – and lots of authorities before – failed to do: make an outdoor centre, which is deeply linked to the education system, pay its way.

Ardroy’s closure was the latest in a long line in Scotland. Peter Higgins, Professor of outdoor education at Edinburgh University, has watched the decline for 30 years since he was an outdoor instructor.

It steepened with local government reorganisation in 1996, when smaller authorities could not shoulder centres’ costs. The reorganisation makes it hard to put a figure on losses Scotland-wide, but 14 of the former authority’s 18 centres are now no longer in local authority control.

Higgins says OE has not been properly valued: “Local authorities used to view these centres as part of educational provision. What they have done more recently is to think of them as different to schools.”

That separation means they are judged on a profit-and-loss basis, unlike other services provided by local authorities, and can be closed because they cost money.

Ardroy is now firmly in the world of profit and loss, although as a social enterprise profits go into the business, and Mr Bruce says staff need to take on board change: “There is a big difference between working in local government and working in the real world.

“In local government you do not normally exceed your 36 or 36.5 hours a week, and that is compounded by a degree of complacency from outdoor centres. You would expect an OE centre to be operating more busily at the weekend and the summer holiday periods – but very little is done at the weekend and an almost nothing in the holidays.”

To make it pay its way he plans to find new customers – groups such as uniformed organisations, those set up to help young carers and less well-off over 50s looking for an outdoor experience, to buy into Ardroy so it is in use during school holidays and at weekends.

He is trimming salaries and benefits for the 10 or so re-employed staff, and there are other savings to be made in coming out of local authority control: for instance, the centre’s minibus can now be serviced locally and the centre no longer pays for IT support.

Mr Higgins believes non-local authority centres and companies providing residential accommodation for schools are useful, but not as good as local authority-run centres: “The ethos of continuity, the link to the education authority and the serious intent to give children a coherent experience built on what they did in school: that depth of relationship is lost. Staff in private centres tend to be more transient.”

Mr Bruce, formerly an executive for Unilever and Watney Mann, knows that while he is chasing cash, the centre needs to retain that connection.

By keeping wages not far off what they were – well above the industry average – he has retained experienced staff such as Phil Thompson, 42, head of the centre, and instructor Simon Ashbell, 33.

Mr Thompson is enjoying the change, despite losing some material benefits. “It has freed us up,” he says simply.

Mr Ashbell is delighted to be back too: “I see the difference we make to children and young people and that’s what makes it worth it.”

Mr Bruce may be a businessman, but he insists he is an idealist: at 71 he has committed himself to working unpaid as Ardroy’s chief executive for the next three years.

Grant Ward, head of leisure and cultural services at Fife Council, says Mr Bruce is facing a challenge, and wishes him well.

He says that for Fife it’s “a win-win” situation: “The council has saved £290,000 and Ardroy is still doing what it did before.”

At the centre, the Auchtermuchty children have been learning how to assess risks, in a scenario based on being marooned on a desert island.

At the end of the three-day course they use a key, obtained through a series of challenges, to open a box. It contains a flare which they set off to summon help.

George Bruce has taken more than a little risk, but hearing his plans, and seeing how his team is inspired to make things work, there’s a good chance he won’t be sending up a distress flare any time soon.