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How to boost learning through play, including the benefits of free and structured play, formal and informal play environments, and child, parent, and teacher-led play.
How to boost learning through play, including the benefits of free and structured play, formal and informal play environments, and child, parent, and teacher-led play.
As Paul Ramchandani writes in “Raising the Nation”, play is the main way in which children (particularly younger children) explore, experiment and build an understanding of the world. This starts from the earliest point of life – in playful relationships with parents and carers, where young babies begin to learn both directly from those carers, but also in the way that carers and others react to them. Children begin to understand that what they do has an impact on the world. This ‘agency’ is one of the most powerful driving forces behind children’s development.
Play and guided play offer strong support for academic and social learning, yet opportunities to play in the classroom and in breaktime have been consistently devalued in England. We want to understand:
Exploring the availability of public spaces (squares, housing estates, parks, playgrounds, streets, youth centres, ‘Sure Start’ centres, nurseries, schools) and private (gardens, houses, businesses).
Places and opportunities to play in local areas have declined in recent decades due to traffic danger, poor planning, loss of space and real and perceived safety issues. Parents’ attitudes to child safety have become more and more heightened due to traffic danger, crime, and victimisation, and fear of these and other dangers often fuelled by high profile media coverage of rare tragedies.
Families are also more mobile than in previous decades that can reduce the sense of community or relationship with neighbours. Practically, more parents are now out at work during the day requiring more formal arrangements around the school day and school holidays to provide childcare.
Evidence suggests that children and parents increasingly see parks as unsafe (unless there has been a positive intervention to support children and families to enjoy parks). This limits access to play and is likely to have a particularly negative impact on children from low income backgrounds who rely more on public space. This was seen most clearly during the pandemic when some children were cooped up in cramped housing with no access to outside space while play parks remained shut.
Recent decades have also seen the growing commercialisation of play with some children unable to access play facilities that are out of town or behind a pay wall.
We want to understand:
Image credit: Playing Out CIC
Consideration of national and local Council responsibilities, tenancy agreements, no ball games signs, UNCRC (as adopted in Scotland), even potentially a possible test legal case.
The UK is a party to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Article 31 of the UNCRC provides for the right of a child to “…rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities…”. It is interconnected with other children’s rights protected within the UNCRC. However, when it comes to implementation, the "right to play" hasn’t a central focus for human rights protection campaigns and legal cases aimed at advocating for this right.
The UNCRC has not yet been directly incorporated into UK law. The national legislation does not specifically address leisure and entertainment rights either. However, in Wales, policies have been officially adopted by local government and implemented in the past twenty years which directly address the right to play based on the UNCRC principles. There is a full scope ministerial report addressing the challenges and issues related to securing children’s right to play in Wales, primarily focusing on the planning regulations and organisation of public spaces and playgrounds.
However, the Children Act 1989 imposes a duty on the local authorities to safeguard and promote the welfare of children and provide the appropriate services in that regard, which should include cultural or recreational activities and assistance to enable the child concerned and his family to have a holiday.
Additionally, the Minimal National Standards for foster carers also set out a requirement for recreation and play. There has also been some court practice around the welfare standard for asylum seeking children, including recreational activities and expenditures on the play-related items such as toys shall be assessed by the local authorities. Otherwise, there has been a notable absence of substantial legal cases to underpin or delineate the legal parameters concerning this matter.
We want to understand:
Exploring the changing school day and year (breaks, after school, half term, and holidays) and changing environments outside school.
Time for play is dwindling. Where once, children would have played out for hours after school and at weekends, life for many children is getting more and more contained and, in many cases, ‘managed’ to fit in with busy work, life and school schedules.
The family ‘timetable’ is now a familiar part of life for many children with schools, sports and activities, travelling time and visiting relatives now creating a constant grid of activity. Many children will also now attend childcare out of school. This is an opportunity to play with friends, though often with limited outdoor and self-directed play.
Add to this the demands of screen time with the constant pressure of communication, browsing and responding and it is easy to see why there is less and less free time.
Many children also complain of increasingly short playtimes with restrictions on the activities on offer.
In 2019 a UCL study found five- to seven-year-olds had 45 minutes less breaktime per week at primary school than children of the same age did in 1995, while secondary pupils aged 11–16 had lost 65 minutes.
We want to understand:
Image credit: Playing Out CIC
How and where children can play in the digital and real realms.
Smart phone ownership is now almost universal once children are in secondary school, and most children are accessing iPads and smart phones from an increasingly young age. Many parents of young children grew up themselves with social media and tech playing a prominent part in their childhood or young adulthood.
Inevitably, these rapid and widespread technological changes have changed the nature of how this generation of children and their families play, both alone and with each other. Children and young people are spending increasing amounts of time online, including gaming on PCs (both on their own and with friends through different apps), and the way they view play is likely to be very different to previous generations.
While there is agreement that access to tech and the internet can bring many benefits to children, including how they learn, a debate is raging over the extent to which children and young people should have access to smart phones and other tech, and screentime.
However, this debate is largely focused on safety and the impact of social media on children’s mental health, and largely skirts over the implications of tech for how children play. The sedentary nature of online play has implications for children’s physical activity and face-to-face social development.
We want to understand:
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How parents’ own relationships to play and their views on safety impact on how their children play.
Most parents want to spend time playing with their children and to give their children the chance to play independently as they grow up but there are often very real reasons why things get in the way. Parents’ options and choices can be restricted by the design and layout of their homes and neighbourhoods. Work and life pressures can often mean that families are time poor, and for those families who are struggling on low incomes the battle to provide food, warmth and a decent place to live can feel overwhelming. Cultural norms can also put excessive pressure on parents to supervise their children closely and restrict their opportunities for independent play, even when they may be ready for this.
Some parents may have their own mental health issues and be experiencing their own stress that means they do not feel confident or comfortable in a play situation. Some parents may also have had little experience of playing with their own parents as they grew up so have little to base their playful behaviour on.
For all parents, the draw of the mobile phone and constant communication and messaging can eat at family time and with-it potential play time with children.
Spending more time with parents and family is consistently one of the top asks for children.
However, play is a vital part of nurturing for children that builds strong and secure attachment between parents and children. Playing together gives children and the relationship time, it focuses on the needs of children and allows them to create and explore safely – over time understanding and nurturing their needs, feelings and experiences.
We want to understand:
Image credit: Playing Out CIC
How play can shape the mental and physical health of children and communities
Children’s health is in crisis in England. Around four in ten children now live with an unhealthy weight and more than 25% are obese, whilst one in five have a probable mental health issue.
This is the culmination of a number of concerning trends and pressures on children’s lives, such as the growing dominance of screens and social media and increased levels of pressure exerted by the school curriculum and exams.
Evidence links play, in particular outdoor play in green spaces, to a range of positive outcomes for physical and mental health, yet is often overlooked from a policy perspective as a tool to address the decline in children’s mental and physical health.
We want to understand:
Image credit: Association of Play Industries
