A day in the life of a Wild Beach Leader

By Ella Garrud

Wild Coast Sussex Communities and Wildlife Officer

The day began with meeting my Wild Beach Assistants Nick and Rebekah, who regularly help me run Wild Beach sessions all along the Sussex coast. This was the second Wild Beach session for a Year Six class at Elm Grove Primary School in Worthing. You could see the excitement on the kids’ faces as they arrived on the beach.

Wild Beach is a child-centred, inspirational outdoor learning experience, which aims to enable children to protect their local coastline and the marine animals that live there. The sessions are run very flexibly, with the activities decided by what the children are finding interesting on the day. The children started by building a wall of stones to work out whether the tide was coming in or out. If the wall got covered by the sea, the tide was coming in, and if the sea got further away from the wall, the tide was going out!

The children then started hunting along the strandline for interesting finds. It soon became clear that there were hundreds of mermaid’s purses washed up on the beach. We set about collecting as many as we could. In total we found 208 skate eggcases and 574 shark eggcases! These were all reported to the Shark Trust as part of their Great Eggcase Hunt citizen science project.

A core message of the Wild Coast Sussex project is to leave the beach and ocean cleaner than you find it. We therefore end every Wild Beach session with a beach clean.

This was a fantastic second session with this class and I am looking forward to the final two with them.

Learn more about our Wild Coast Sussex project here, including how to enquire about booking some Wild Beach sessions for your school.