How everyday conditions shape participation at school

Schools are not only places where environmental issues are taught, but outdoor and material environments where education is lived under uneven climatic conditions. This study examined rainfall exposure as a condition shaping the possibilities for outdoor participation across Australian schools in 2025. Using a national cross-sectional spatial design, school-level Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority data were linked with Bureau of Meteorology gridded monthly rainfall data. Monthly rainfall was extracted for 11,025 schools and aggregated into annual, seasonal and core school-year exposure measures. Annual rainfall ranged from 57.99 mm to 5161.52 mm, with a national mean of 933.19 mm and a median of 788.96 mm. Exposure was geographically concentrated, with the highest values located primarily in tropical Queensland, northern New South Wales and parts of the Northern Territory. Using the 90th percentile threshold, 1,112 schools were classified as high-rainfall schools, representing more than 440,000 student enrolments. A February-November school-year sensitivity measure produced a similar exposure profile, indicating that the pattern was not simply an artefact of rainfall during the main summer holiday period. High-rainfall schools also had lower mean Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage than schools outside the high-rainfall zone. These findings position rainfall as an underexamined outdoor and environmental condition of schooling, with implications for school grounds, recess, outdoor learning, infrastructure planning and educational equity.