Availability of nature and access to nature in school: evidence from a Danish longitudinal school study

There has been an increasing focus on test scores and rankings in schools. However, the focus on children’s standardized test scores has come at the cost of their social relations. As a reaction to this test-centric focus, new approaches claim that nature is important not only for children’s social relations but also for their scholastic achievement. Drawing on a longitudinal dataset following 1,087 Danish schoolchildren in the Municipality of Aalborg, this paper sets out to investigate the impact of the availability of nature and access to nature on social relations and scholastic achievement. We address the endogeneity of child quality by applying a value-added approach and the endogeneity of school quality using propensity score matching. Our analyses suggest that the availability of nature and access to nature in themselves are not enough to promote social relations.