McClelland, D. and Purdy, N. (2023) Back to the future: Contemporary lessons from a century of learning at Arellian, Ireland’s oldest nursery.

This article emerges from a SCoTENS-funded research project, Contested Childhoods Across Borders and Boundaries (2019-2021), jointly conducted by Maynooth University and Stranmillis University College. It focuses on the origins, distinctiveness, and enduring relevance of the Arellian Nursery, the first nursery school in Ireland (North or South), which first opened its doors in 1928. Drawing on original sources and historical records, the article charts the establishment of Arellian as a philanthropic, privately sponsored venture in south Belfast, founded, from the outset, to address educational and social disadvantage and to promote outdoor learning, healthy lifestyles, pupil agency, and home-school links. Influenced by pioneers such as Grace Owen and Margaret McMillan, themselves disciples of Froebel, play, as a means of learning and development, was considered of great importance. While the founders and early superintendents of Arellian might have
been seen as progressive, anti-establishment outliers, our contemporary context highlights the prescience and enduring relevance of the vision of Arellian almost a hundred years later. Active outdoor learning, healthy lifestyles, agentic learning, and home-school-community partnerships are becoming increasingly mainstream tenets throughout the Northern Irish education system. It is argued that, as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, important lessons can be learned for educators and teacher educators from the example of Arellian, Ireland’s very first
nursery school.