This article will be included in the Healthy Living Environment Newsletter. You can subscribe here to stay updated.
When I visit the schoolyard at Arendal Upper Secondary School on a sunny day, I see students sitting together in the amphitheatre, spending time in the activity area and eating lunch on the sun-wave bench.
Just a year ago, this same space was filled with parked cars and mopeds. Students rarely spent time outside during the school day, while most teachers drove to work.
Today, the atmosphere is entirely different. I still remember one student's description of the sun-wave bench near the entrance. On warm and sunny days, she said, it feels almost like being at the beach. One group of boys from Ukraine shared another story that has stayed with me. Before the outdoor gym was installed, they said they hardly knew any Norwegian students. By exercising together in the schoolyard, they gradually got to know more people and built friendships across cultures. For me, that conversation captured the true value of the project far better than any statistic could.
Looking back, I do not believe the reason it took more than fifteen years to create a proper schoolyard for students at Arendal Upper Secondary School was a lack of plans, policies or knowledge. Norway has strong public health ambitions, clear planning frameworks and national guidelines emphasizing the importance of outdoor environments for learning, physical activity and wellbeing. Yet for more than fifteen years, little changed. The problem was not a lack of evidence. It was the challenge of turning that evidence into action.
In many transformation projects, the real question is not who has the strongest arguments, but who owns the story. In our case, the debate became focused on parking. Teachers who were about to lose parking spaces understandably voiced their concerns. They were organised, visible and directly affected. As a result, the debate centred on what staff might lose rather than what students might gain. Meanwhile, the absence of a meaningful outdoor space for hundreds of students received far less attention.
The loss of parking became the story. The opportunity to create a schoolyard did not.
What eventually changed was not the evidence itself. The evidence had been there all along. What changed was our ability to connect evidence and ambitions to a concrete place and a tangible opportunity: transforming a parking lot into a schoolyard. Once we demonstrated that continuing to use the schoolyard for parking made it impossible to fully deliver on the goals Agder County had already adopted, it became much easier to build support and secure the decisions needed to move forward.
Gradually, the story began to change. It was no longer about parking. It was about students' right to a school environment that supports recreation, physical activity, social interaction, learning and wellbeing. Instead of talking about what staff might lose, we started talking about what students could gain.
We invested significantly in participation throughout the process. While students were the primary focus, school management, teachers and neighbours were also involved. Through workshops, dialogue and design activities, students were invited to share their ideas, needs and aspirations for the new schoolyard. Their contributions influenced everything from the overall vision to specific design elements. In this way, creating the new schoolyard became about more than redesigning a physical space. By involving students throughout the process, we helped create a sense of ownership. The schoolyard was not simply built for students. It was created with them.
Looking back on the process, the most important lesson for me was that transformation is rarely driven by evidence alone. Evidence matters, but change happens when people can connect that evidence to places, experiences and opportunities they care about. We also came to understand that people who risk losing something often have a stronger voice than those who stand to benefit from change in the future. Successful transformations require recognising this imbalance and ensuring that the benefits of change are made visible, tangible and compelling. Perhaps most importantly, we learned that meaningful change rarely happens without resistance. When people feel they are losing something of value, opposition is a natural and predictable part of the journey. Addressing those concerns while maintaining focus on the long-term benefits of change is essential for successful transformation.
Christine Mikkelsen
Agder fylkeskommune, Norway
