This morning, somewhere in England, a practitioner unlocked a garden gate that had been shut all summer. The grass has grown long. There are spiderwebs strung between the fence posts, heavy with dew, and the mud kitchen pans have collected six weeks of rainwater. In a few hours, children will pour through that gate — some returning, some brand new, some clinging to a parent’s leg — and the autumn term will begin.
It begins, this year, under an updated rulebook. The revised EYFS statutory framework came into force on 1 September 2026, and most of the coverage so far has treated it as an indoor story: sleep rooms, screens, safeguarding files. Understandable — that’s where most of the changes sit. But if your setting takes learning outside (and under the EYFS, every setting should), the new framework reaches the garden, the forest school site, and the fire circle too.
Here’s what’s actually changed, what it means once you step outdoors, and a realistic way to get on top of it in the first fortnight of term.
What’s Changed in the EYFS Framework — the Short Version
The September 2026 updates are welfare-led rather than curriculum-led. The seven areas of learning are untouched, and no ratio numbers change. What’s been strengthened is the safeguarding and welfare backbone:
- Screen use. For the first time, providers must have regard to formal guidance on children’s screen use: avoid screens for under-twos (video calls with family excepted), limit two-to-five-year-olds to no more than an hour a day — less where possible — and use screens only where there’s a clear learning and development purpose.
- Safer sleep. The safer sleep guidance now sits as explicit statutory wording in the framework itself, rather than a linked document.
- Checks and disclosure. Enhanced DBS checks now extend to volunteers who help out three or more days in any 30-day period; new staff cannot start before their checks come back; and staff must disclose arrests and charges, not only convictions and cautions.
- A lower reporting bar. The word “serious” has gone: providers must now notify Ofsted of allegations of harm, not just serious harm.
- Ratios across the whole provision. Not a new number — a clarification that ratios apply across the whole provision, not room by room. More on why that matters outdoors below.
- Dogs. Banned breeds must not be kept or present on the premises at any time.
If some of this feels familiar, that’s because September 2026 builds directly on last September’s overhaul — the formalised Designated Safeguarding Lead role, safeguarding training refreshed at least every two years, the safer eating expectations around weaning, allergies and choking, and follow-up on unexplained absences. Those requirements are now a year old, and Ofsted has been explicit that safeguarding and children’s welfare underpin the September 2026 updates to early years inspections. A year in, inspectors won’t be asking whether last year’s requirements are in your policy folder. They’ll be looking at whether they’ve become habit.
None of this restricts outdoor learning. But almost all of it touches outdoor learning. Let’s take it section by section.
The Screen Time Guidance Is Quietly a Vote for the Garden
Read the new screen use guidance slowly and something interesting emerges. The framework isn’t just capping screen time — it’s asking providers to justify every minute of it. “A clear learning and development purpose” is a high bar, and it invites an obvious question: if not a screen, then what?
The honest answer, for most of what young children need, is the world outside the door. The under-two who would have watched a video about animals can watch a real blackbird pulling a real worm out of real grass. The four-year-olds who might have done a counting app can count conkers, collect them in tens, and feel the cold weight of them in their palms. Screens compress experience; gardens expand it.
This is worth saying to your team in exactly those terms, because the screen guidance can otherwise land as a loss — one more thing taken away, one more rule. Framed differently, it’s permission: the strongest statutory signal yet that first-hand, sensory, outdoor experience is the developmental gold standard. If you’re looking for a term’s worth of alternatives, a season-led outdoor plan (our September settling-in guide is a good place to start) will absorb every minute the screens give back, and children will come in at the end of the session with pink cheeks and something to tell someone about.
A practical step for this month: audit when and why screens currently appear in your day, and for each use, ask whether an outdoor or hands-on equivalent exists. Most settings find the screen was habit, not strategy.
Safeguarding Doesn’t Stop at the Back Door
The strengthened safeguarding requirements apply everywhere children are — which means your outdoor provision needs the same rigour as your rooms, evidenced just as clearly. (If you want the inspection-side view, our guide to outdoor learning and the new Ofsted framework covers how inspectors are approaching it — statutory requirements and inspection expectations now pull in the same direction.)
Supervision and sightlines. Walk your outdoor space this week as if you’d never seen it. Where do children disappear from view — behind the shed, inside the den, around the willow tunnel? Losing sight of children isn’t automatically a problem (managed privacy is part of good outdoor play), but it must be a decision, written into your risk-benefit assessments, rather than an accident of layout.
Ratios follow the children outside. The clarification that ratios apply across the whole provision is the sleeper change for outdoor settings. In free-flow provision, staff deployment has to track where children actually are, minute by minute — not where the rota says they should be. Pair it with the absence follow-up expectations introduced last September and the practical test is simple: at any moment, can you say who is in, who is out, who is outside, and who is with them? Your registration and headcount routines need to pass that test across the indoor–outdoor boundary, not just at the door.
Devices and photography outdoors. Your safe use of mobile phones and cameras policy follows staff into the garden. If practitioners capture learning moments on tablets outside, the policy should say which devices, where they’re stored during outdoor sessions, and how images are transferred and deleted. Fences and hedges also matter here: think about where your outdoor space can be seen or photographed from beyond the boundary.
Everyone on site. The widened checks reach further than many settings realise: a volunteer who helps three or more days in a 30-day period now needs an enhanced DBS check, new starters can’t begin before their checks are back, and by extension anyone regularly present while children are outdoors — including maintenance contractors — belongs in your suitability thinking. It’s one of the quieter reasons the managed model is gaining ground: with a provider like Beehive Tipis, the people who inspect, maintain and transform an outdoor classroom through the seasons arrive DBS checked, with structural inspection records and fire safety documentation already in the format inspectors expect — one less folder for the DSL to build from scratch.
Safer Eating in the Fresh Air
The safer eating expectations aren’t new this September — they arrived with the 2025 framework. But a year on, they’re exactly the kind of requirement inspectors now expect to see running as habit, and outdoor snack is where otherwise-careful settings most often slip.
Outdoor snack is one of the loveliest rituals in early years — apple slices under a canvas canopy while the rain taps overhead is the kind of memory that outlasts any tracker. The safer eating expectations don’t threaten it; they just ask you to run it with the same discipline as the indoor snack table.
Three things to check. First, the food-and-drink point: whoever pours at outdoor snack needs the same allergy and dietary information as whoever serves lunch indoors, so make sure the current dietary list travels outside (laminated, in the snack basket) rather than living on the kitchen wall. Second, choking awareness: children sitting, adults present and watching, food prepared to the same cutting guidance — the fact that you’re on a log circle rather than at a table changes nothing. Third, if you cook outdoors — campfire bread, foraged blackberry crumble — your risk-benefit assessment should explicitly connect to your safer eating procedures, not just your fire safety ones.
Dogs, Visitors and the Wilder Edges
The new rule on dogs is blunt: banned breeds must not be kept or present on the premises at any time. It’s aimed mainly at premises where a dog lives or visits — but it’s worth reading your procedures with animals in mind more broadly: therapy dog visits, farm sessions, a parent who walks their dog onto site at pick-up. Off-site forest school sessions in public woodland deserve a line too, since you can’t control which dogs you’ll meet under the oaks. None of this means avoiding animals — encounters with living creatures are irreplaceable — it means naming the possibility in your paperwork before an inspector names it for you.
A First-Fortnight Checklist
You don’t need to do everything today. You need a defensible plan. Over the next two weeks:
- List everyone who volunteers three or more days in a 30-day period and check their enhanced DBS status — and brief staff on the new duty to disclose arrests and charges.
- Check your notification procedures reflect the lowered reporting threshold: allegations of harm, not just serious harm.
- Audit screen use against the new guidance and plan outdoor alternatives.
- Read your sleep policy against the framework’s safer sleep wording, which is now statutory.
- Walk the outdoor space and refresh risk-benefit assessments, noting sightlines and supervision decisions.
- Test your registration, headcount and ratio routines across indoor–outdoor free flow.
- Move a current copy of dietary and allergy information into your outdoor snack routine — last year’s rule, this year’s habit.
- Add dogs and animal encounters to your visitor and off-site procedures, then diarise a half-term review to check it’s all become habit rather than paperwork.
Do those eight things and you’ll be ahead of most of the sector — and, more importantly, your children will spend the autumn outdoors in a provision that’s as safe as it feels free.
The updated framework asks more of settings, there’s no pretending otherwise. But its direction of travel — real food carefully shared, fewer screens, watchful adults, children outside in all weathers — looks a lot like what the best early years practice has always been. If you’re exploring outdoor learning for your setting and would rather someone else carried the compliance load, we’d love to chat — hello@beehivetipis.co.uk.