Author: The Playwork Foundation

As lockdown eases, what children, families, AND teachers now desperately need is a great Summer of Play – but who will provide it?

The cautious optimism among play advocates in recent weeks, that the Covid-19 pandemic may lead to a fundamental re-evaluation of what is most important for children, their families, and communities, was given a cold reality check on Sunday, when the UK’s most progressive mainstream newspaper, the Guardian/Observer, dedicated its entire editorial to an 8-point ‘manifesto for children’ without once mentioning their need to play. It is an illustration (again) of how lowly children’s own priorities are within the national debate about what is best for them.

At the start of the lockdown nobody was too surprised, in the circumstances, that the government’s response to an open letter from more than 40 play researchers, practitioners, and advocates asking for ‘clear advice’ about outdoor play, merely reiterated that we all must ‘focus on preventing the spread of Covid-19 (and) protecting the most vulnerable in society’. When the government’s only other stated priority was ‘offering support to those impacted by social-distancing, including companies and employees’, it was clear that the sudden constraints on space and opportunity for children to play was not going to be even a secondary issue for ministers.

‘There is little evidence that children’s profound need to play has received any more consideration. How lowly their own priorities are within the national debate about what is best for them’.

Now, as we move towards a substantial easing of the lockdown, these fears are born out. Children’s profound need to play has received little or no consideration from the government.

Researchers concerned

Some eminent researchers, including the ‘Play First’ alliance, have expressed serious concerns about the effect that a lack of play opportunities is having on children’s mental health, and called on the government to ease lockdown ‘in a way that provides all children with the time and opportunity to play with peers, in and outside of school … even while social distancing measures remain in place’. Others have specifically called for a nationwide plan to repurpose residential streets for play during lockdown and beyond.

The four national UK play organisations have endorsed a report from the Play Safety Forum calling for the government’s approach to be ‘urgently reviewed’ on the basis that the current policy ‘completely ignores’ the benefits of outdoor play to children (especially at a time of stress and uncertainty), while the risks of infection are ‘very low’.

Strong words

These are strong words, and necessarily so. The government in Westminster has indeed ignored children’s play as a policy issue ever since it first came to power on 2010, in spite of long recognising it as such. Having abandoned the Play Strategy for England, it believes local authorities should make their own policies for play, but has starved them of the cash that most of them would need to do anything meaningful, at the same time as deregulating both planning and childcare in ways that relegate children’s play to the status of an optional extra.

‘For children the overwhelming priority is playing with their friends’.

Now, however, would be the moment to think again. Millions of parents, teachers and children are stressed, tired and seriously unhappy after a full term-and-a-half trying to keep up with the curriculum via variable on-line platforms and ad hoc home-schooling, without receiving any of the ‘softer’ benefits of being part of the school community. For children this overwhelmingly means playing with their friends.

The government has announced a ‘Covid catch-up’ package for primary and secondary schools to support children returning to school in September to recover lost ground, and has also said that providers running holiday clubs and activities for children over the summer holiday will be able to open ‘if the science allows’ (although the guidance on this seems to be delayed). The relative importance attached to these two measures? £1 billion is allocated to the former, zero to the latter, which is conceived primarily as a service to parents – who will no doubt have to cover the cost themselves. For many, many children – the same children for whom the £1b catch-up fund is designed – this will mean summer play schemes are unaffordable. In turn, many independent providers will be unable to operate – which puts an additional pressure on schools, just as they need the mother of all breaks.

A play recovery fund

The answer is obvious. A discreet ‘play recovery’ fund should be established, in consultation with the play and playwork sectors, to enable non-school based holiday play schemes to be offered free of charge in the areas that will need them most. And the government should also talk to Playing Out, its network of street play activators, and the growing number of local authorities who now support temporary street closures for play, to consider an expanded national programme of street play sessions over the summer.

Some will think such an idea cavalier: that children’s outdoor play is simply too random and chaotic to observe any kind of public health protocols, even with the distancing requirements relaxed. But even if the Play Safety Forum’s persuasive risk-benefit assessment is disregarded, the government should know that the playwork field is highly professional, and always resourceful. Whatever the safety measures might need to be, no one will be better at engaging with children to follow them than playworkers.

Playwork responds to the crisis

For a field seriously depleted after 10 years of austerity, deregulation, and (in England) policy neglect, the field rallied well to respond to the crisis – in spite of some of its fundamental tenets seeming completely untenable in a public health emergency that demands distance, isolation, and regimentation. Playwork practitioners and advocates have offered timely guidance on how to sustain play opportunities through the lockdown, including playing at home. Adventure playgrounds have reached out to offer relational space and support to communities whose physical playgrounds were closed, and some practitioners have given new meaning to the term face-to-face playwork by taking it to the online platforms with which we are all now so familiar.

Play England and the great playwork theorist, Bob Hughes, have set out some wise words and good practical advice on ‘Play after Lockdown’. But first, in this time of national crisis, with families desperately needing a break before a return to the new normal – many of them unable to go away because of increased job insecurity or unemployment – the country needs the play sector to step up and do what it does best: give our kids space and support to have a good time. From within the billions that this terrible pandemic has cost the economy, is a few million for a well-deserved and badly needed Summer of Play, too much to expect? At the very least, the Observer should include it in its manifesto.

Adrian Voce

This blog was first published on policyforplay.com

Academics highlight children’s need for street play during lockdown

There are growing calls this morning for governments and local authorities to urgently look at steps to allow more children to use their local streets for outside play.

A new paper by Prof. Alison Stenning and Dr. Wendy Russell explores the issues around children’s access to space during government restrictions, within the context of the vital importance of play for their wellbeing and resilience.

The paper suggests that rethinking the purpose of residential streets may hold a key to making the lockdown less harmful to children, more bearable for families, and, therefore more sustainable for communities.

Read the full paper here.

(reblogged from policyforplay.com)

Gordon Sturrock

6th February 1948 – 16th June 2019

Gordon Sturrock, who has died, aged 71, was a giant of playwork: a voracious scholar and a fierce, original thinker, with a radical vision of the importance of play in the lives of children and society.

Although critical of how the practice was adapted by public policy in this area – driven, as he saw it, by a childcare and education agenda, rather than a true recognition of children’s right to play – Gordon was one of the very small number of playwork theorists whose ideas became part of the vocational training curriculum for the mainstream children’s workforce.

Gordon spent his first six years in India, where his nursemaid, or ayah, imbued him with a spiritual sense that never left him. He was returned to Scotland to be educated, a wrench from his parents that eventually resulted in his conviction that life traumas could be healed through therapy, play, and playwork. As he often said, ‘It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.’

After boarding school in Scotland, he trained in Jungian psychology and later referred to himself, with typical self-deprecation, as a ‘failed analyst’. His psychotherapy training introduced him to the work of DW Winnicott, and thus to a fascination with scientific and theoretical perspectives on children’s play, which would become his life’s work.

Knowing that an understanding of play from the literature would only take him so far, Gordon found work on the burgeoning adventure playground scene in London in the 1970s and 80s, eventually becoming the play officer for the London Borough of Camden. Here, he began to involve himself in the emerging moves to professionalise playwork, and its embryonic institutions, joining the board of the Joint National Committee for Training in Playwork.

Around this time, he became a founder director of Interplay, a company that designed children’s fixed playground equipment; he also worked hard to establish Children’s Village, an ambitious project involving many activities and services for children, all under one umbrella. Unfortunately, the recession spelt the end for both enterprises.

He then gravitated towards teaching, taking a lecturing position at Thurrock, University of East London, and increasingly collaborating on a variety of papers expounding his ideas. The most influential of these, written with the late Perry Else, and widely known in playwork circles simply as ‘the Colorado paper’ (1998), describes the ludic ecology, the play cycle, and the subjective role of the practitioner in responding to play cues. Sturrock and Else called this practice therapeutic playwork, and suggested it was rich in creative and healing potential.

In 2003-04, Gordon developed, for the University of Gloucestershire, two undergraduate modules in therapeutic playwork, which remained a fixture for the duration of that programme. His and Else’s ideas, along with those of his friend and professional confidante, Bob Hughes, became the bedrocks for the development of recognised training and qualifications in playwork; part of the ongoing professionalisation of the field that had its short-lived apotheosis in the £235m national play strategy for England (2008), later abandoned to austerity.

Although subsequently operating outside academia, and not being widely published, Gordon remained one of the field’s leading thinkers right up to his death, sustaining a rich dialogue with many collaborators and colleagues, often in more mainstream positions than he; stimulating and provoking each, with the breadth of his own studies, the erudition of his ideas and interpretations, and the political and ethical positions he urged us to either embrace or challenge.

Gordon was an inspiring teacher and mentor, and a compelling speaker. He had a sharp but playful sense of humour: it was he who coined the collective noun for playworkers as ‘a lateness’. His writing, however, was not to everyone’s taste; it was not an easy read, with its characteristic sprinkling of academic vocabulary and numerous neologisms. But to those who persevered, he brought insights and interpretations to bear on a vocation that most of us understood only instinctively. His firm belief that play was at the very root of human experience led him to devour new ideas on everything from neuroscience and evolutionary biology, to the future of democracy and the commons movement. That he was able to make each of these perspectives highly relevant to understanding the space in which children play – and our responsibilities in entering it – was his great gift. 

In his later years, his illness and its finality seemed to reinvigorate Gordon’s appetite for work. In 2018, already seriously unwell, he co-organised, with Bob Hughes, a Play Education conference in Cambridge, hoping to breathe new life into a field that seemed in the doldrums after eight years of austerity. The event revealed him to be as passionately motivated as ever to articulate a grand narrative of the playwork ethos and its practice. He also sought out new collaborators and embarked on a prolific writing spree that produced a book, co-authored with Dr. Pete King of the University of Swansea, and a series of original pamphlets, each to be now, sadly, published as posthumous works.

Gordon is survived by his wife, Sue.

Adrian Voce

The Play Cycle: Theory, Research and Application, by Pete King and Gordon Sturrock, is published by Routledge in June 2019.

Members meeting

1 July 2019
10.30 – 16.00

University of Gloucestershire
Oxstalls Campus
Oxstalls Lane
Gloucester
GL2 9HW

The Playwork Foundation is holding a meeting of its members, the first, other than our policy roadshow events, since registering as a charity in 2018. 

This meeting will be crucial to the future of the Foundation, and we would love to see you there.

Among items on the agenda will be:

a) A report on our work with Play England to develop a campaign for national government play policy, following the roadshow consultation
b) An update and discussion about playwork training and qualifications;
c) Future plans and strategy for the Foundation 
d) Some key playwork projects regarding play and health
e) Networking!

The event is free to members with lunch and refreshments provided.

Please bring photos and reports of work, good news, good practice and ideas to share with other members.

Please register for the event here:

aliwood@blueyonder.co.uk

Thank you, we hope to see you in Gloucester!

What influences playwork?

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Which writers and which fields of study, if any, have most influenced your playwork practice?

Masters student Adrian Voce is researching the academic and other influences on playwork and would like your help (he has promised to share the results with us in a future edition!)

Please complete the short survey here

Thank you!

Did you attend an after-school club during the 1990s or 2000s?

When you were at school you may have attended an after-school club at the end of the school day.  The after-school club may have been in your school, community hall or even a leisure centre.  The after-school club was not part of the school curriculum run by the school (for example it is not a football club or homework club organised by the school as an extra-curricular activity), but was a club where you could play.  The after-school club had adults supervising who were called playworkers or childcare workers.

If you did attend an after-school club in your childhood, we are looking for adults (parents, carers and non-parents) to complete a short online survey on your experiences.  The online survey is short and will take no longer than 10 minutes to complete and all information will be anonymous. 

If you are interested in taking part, you can access the online survey by clicking on this link

For more information please contact Dr Pete King atp.f.king@swansea.ac.uk
or call 01792 602 314D

The right to play is for every child, regardless of where they live

‘She seems genuinely impressed when she hears about the freedom and control that children have here, and especially at the sense of community and social connection they exhibit: that this is their place, of which they are immensely proud. Before she moves on, The Princess Royal turns to me and says that these children, from the ‘deprived’ social housing estates in the looming shadow of Waterloo Station, seem to be enjoying the kind of childhood that many supposedly better-off children would relish’.

From Policy for Play, responding to children’s forgotten right
Adrian Voce (Policy Press, 2015)

Writing in the Guardian this week, Harriet Grant reports on what can only be described as a form of social apartheid, in the design of a small housing estate in London. The article relates how, in a new mixed development on the site of the old Lilian Baylis School in SE1, North Lambeth, children living in social housing are excluded from the supposedly ‘communal’ play areas, where access is exclusive to those from the privately-owned units.

The article has caused a media furore, with everyone from the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, to the Communities Secretary, James Brokenshire, decrying what architect Dinah Bornat, an expert on child-friendly housing, has called a shameful abuse of the planning process. Victoria Derbyshire’s daytime TV programme featured mums from each part of the estate, united in wanting all their children to be able to play together equally.

As of lunchtime today, the BBC was reporting that Henley Housing, the developer, has said it ‘has no objection to residents in the social housing estate accessing all the play areas’; it was ‘leading the way’ to find a ‘workable solution’. This was later confirmed by Grant in a follow-up to her Guardian story. The BBC reported that Warwick Estates, who manage the private part of the estate, however, are making no comment.

If they each think it’s wrong, who is responsible?

It is striking from Grant’s original piece how a variety of key players (no pun intended) – the designer, the developer, the council, the Mayor and the government – seem to agree (in the glare of media scrutiny anyway) that this segregation of children’s play space by home-ownership status is wrong. And yet there it is. If they each think it’s wrong, who is responsible? Dinah Bornat says she is still trying to get to the bottom of it. There has even been talk of a possible legal challenge by some housing law specialists and children’s rights advocacy groups.

My correspondence, going back to June last year, from one of the parents at Baylis Old School, reveals that the segregation of the play area is in fact only the latest instalment in a running battle at this site, between residents who understood from the marketing that they were moving into a genuinely child-friendly development, and the estate managers, for whom children’s play of any stripe seems to have been largely conceived as a nuisance to be policed.

Whether or not a ‘workable solution’ can be found for the Baylis Old School development (now it is in the media spotlight), the wider questions are: how common is this, and how can it be prevented? How can children’s right to play together in the common spaces of their immediate neighbourhoods – a feature of childhood as ancient as society itself, and believed by scientists to be a key to our evolution as a species – be better protected? Is this not a failure of public policy, wherein children’s right to play receives scant recognition, and no support, in defiance of various UN reports criticising the government for its dereliction?

I want to suggest four distinct policy measures that would make such an occurrence ­– and the wider disregard for children’s rights in public space –much less likely in the future.

1.Reform national planning policy

As the retreat of children from public space became a growing cause of concern through the 90s and 2000s, so the need for a greater role for planning policy to provide guidance on children’s play space became more and more accepted, with major planning documents such as the first London Plan and the government’s National Planning Policy Guidance 17 on Recreational Space, each highlighting the need for planners and developers to include children’s play within the overall concept and masterplan for any residential development.

At the time of the change of government in 2010, Play England had been commissioned to produce specific planning guidance that was to have been published by the Department for Communities and Local Government. It never saw the light of day and, as everyone now knows, the entire suite of national planning policy documents was soon torn up and replaced by one slim volume. It seems clear that The National Planning Policy Framework is only fit for purpose if that purpose is to allow the concept and design of the public realm to be led by developers. Brought in at a time of perceived crisis for the economy, it is now surely time for a review.

2. Reinstate children’s play as a matter of government policy

Would Lambeth council have allowed the developer at the Baylis Old School site to alter the plans and create a segregated play area if children’s play had been higher on their political radar? Perhaps, but, it would have been less likely. When there was a Secretary of State for Children, with a serious national play policy, including a 10-year strategy and a £390m funding programme (including £155m of lottery money), local authorities were required to have a current local play strategy and play partnership, based squarely on principles and understandings about children’s right to play. Children’s play in England since 2010 has all but disappeared from the policy agenda other than as a tool for early learning and will continue to be neglected by cash-strapped local authorities until there is again some national leadership on the issue.

3. Adopt the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into UK Law

It has been both heartening and a bit depressing to see the parents from both sides of this unwanted divide citing children’s right to play equally, as per the UNCRC, in their campaign to end this terrible practice. Heartening, because we are often told there is not much appetite for children’s rights among the British public; the outpouring of sympathy for these children, and the stance of their parents suggests otherwise. Depressing because because the UK, (or, more particularly, the UK government, and therefore England) is one of the more reluctant signatories to the convention. The UK is one of the very few developed-world governments not to have adopted the convention into national legislation, ranked a lowly 187th by the Kids Rights Index which monitors the degree of integration of children’s rights into national policy and legislation. This is why finding a viable legal challenge to this shameful decision may be harder than it ought to be.

4. Designate London and other conurbations Child Friendly Cities

The UN’s Habitat conferences of the 90s highlighted the particular threats to the wellbeing of children and young people by increasing urbanisation, population growth and poor long-term planning by municipal government. UNICEF’s Child Friendly Cities Initiative is designed to ensure that local authorities, regardless of national government policy, fully adopt and implement the UNCRC within all relevant policies and processes. Very few British councils have signed up for the UNICEF initiative – many citing austerity and the cost of the programme – but some, like Bristol, have nevertheless declared their commitment to being a child friendly city and are developing plans and strategies accordingly. A child-friendly city is not just a city where child-friendly design principles are more widely adopted, but one where, as a cornerstone of the children’s rights ethos, these principles are applied equally to all children. 15 years after City Hall hosted the second international child-friendly city conference, Sadiq Khan should formally commit the capital to becoming a recognised Child Friendly City. His current London Plan revision is the perfect opportunity.

As a playworker in the 1980s, I had the privilege of working at an adventure playground in the same part of London as the Baylis Old School development. Like all such places (now sadly diminishing in number), it had its own unique character and culture, reflecting that of the local children who used it. One abiding memory is of how proud they were, not just of the playground (which they helped to build), but of their ‘manor’: the social housing estates in the shadow of Waterloo Station. Applying for grants for our project from the various funding programmes for deprived inner-city areas was frequently met with their scorn. “We’re not deprived; this ain’t a deprived area. Flaming cheek!’ would be one of the more printable reactions. As my story of the visit by our patron Princess Anne relates, there was support for this view from some unlikely sources.

Whatever else was going on in their lives, in one very important regard these children were indeed far from deprived. The adventure playground, and the wider public spaces surrounding it, were theirs to explore from an early age. With no gardens of their own, children from as young as 4-5 would be outside on a daily basis, in groups of siblings and friends – playing, making friends, getting up to mischief, growing up. The adventure playground was their place, but in those (pre-childcare registration) days of open-access, ‘drop-in-drop-out’ attendance, the wider public space of their estates was also their domain.

These kids, like so many who grew up before the outdoor world had become a no-go area for them, had the richest of play lives: meaning they grew up learning the physical and social competence, self-confidence and resourcefulness that only comes from having time and space to play, away from adult direction, structures and rules; immersing themselves, daily, in their own culture and society; making decisions and taking risks for themselves. In so doing they also developed the ‘place attachment’ so important to identity and citizenship.

Like the parents at Baylis Old School today, the adults in the lives of those children in the North Lambeth of the 1980s – indeed society as a whole, even if by a kind of benign neglect – understood the importance of their right to play, and that this right was for every child, regardless of where they live.

Adrian Voce
Image: Marc Rusines

Adrian Voce is the current President of the European Network for Child Friendly Cities. He is a trustee of the Playwork Foundation and an associate board member of Playing Out. His book, Policy for Play was published in 2015.

Let’s make this thing our metaphorical campfire

Penny Wilson offers a personal view of the struggles of playwork in a world that undervalues play, and of how the Playwork Foundation represents an opportunity for developing our common cause, building mutual support and working together for the growing recognition we deserve.

Sometimes, being a playworker feels isolated. We struggle – with local authorities, housing associations, funders, government, the media and the public – to communicate what we are doing and why.  The play illiterate look down on us; often either patronising or simply dismissing us and our work.

We have a strong body of knowledge, dating back some 70 years showing the urgent need for free play to be accessible to children, showing how best to support that play and design and provide for it.  We have developed play theory, and there is a mountain of research showing how play ­–unstructured, child-led play – is of overwhelming benefit to children.

We have a language to explain the mechanics of the craft of playwork. Yet still we find resistance in almost every sphere of influence to our work. We can prove and prove and prove the efficacy of playwork in the lives of children over and over and over again. We state and restate our case and our perspectives.  We write and rewrite the simple things we need to be understood. 

The world seems to be play-blind.

Yet, we are continually thwarted in our work. People cannot see or hear play. They show endless resentment towards play and those who advocate for it. We all have hundreds of examples of the insults and semi-truths that have been conjured up to discredit and infantilise play and playworkers. It is frustrating and belittling. The world seems to be play-blind. We feel as powerless as the child trying to play. The odds are against us. We have no voice.

In our teams, we can band together, talk and use humour to counteract the frustrations. We can think laterally, advocating for play in creative, imaginative and positive ways. We can start social media discussion groups to broaden our thinking and engender mutual support. We can do this locally and internationally.

We can sometimes afford to go to conferences and, whenever that is possible, it is great for us. But our wages are low and our projects mostly insufficiently funded; we cannot often find the funds to attend, and they cannot always cover our absence when we do.

Some of us decide that higher education in play is the route to becoming more respected and better informed; to be heard. This is also great, but it is only a partial solution. We are asked for our base-level qualifications to gain employment, but even that level of qualification, enfeebled as it often is, is now almost impossible to gain.

the craft and knowledge and voice of the playworkers, advocating for the right of (every) child to play, is undermined

The play equipment industry has a loud voice. It has products to sell, an easy solution to a tick box requirement of landlords and landholders to provide some play space. Buy it and … Snap! The problem is solved. Quick and simple. The relationship between society and children’s play is resolved with one easy gift; give the kid a sweetie to stop it crying. Once again, the craft and knowledge and voice of the playworkers, advocating for the right of (every) child to play, is undermined by a passive-aggressive sop to short term gratification.

Even the organisations established to promote play are frequently unsupportive and undermining of playworkers, choosing to promote their own structural interests  by renaming our work so that they can appear to have invented something new themselves or look to volunteers to replace us. Our unions are happy to accept our dues, but there is seldom a reasonable return for those dues. We are unrepresented. No one hears us. No one speaks up for us We are beset with difficulties. We always have been. We feel sorry for ourselves and undervalued.

A place to take pride in ourselves …

It is unsurprising therefore that we turn on each other, choosing to try to scramble to the top of the heap and squash our peers down to raise ourselves up. We are frequently vicious in our infighting. We prefer to squabble with each other than to seek common ground in the acceptance and respect of  our differences.

We need a shared identity. We need to feel proud of ourselves and of each other. We need to be able to stand tall and advocate for play with pride. Playworkers need to have a metaphorical bonfire to sit around, a place to understand what we share and why we are so prepared to remain so dedicated to our work in the face of such overwhelming adversity. A place to find ourselves reflected in the faces or our peers. A place to take pride in ourselves.

The Playwork Foundation is an attempt to provide recognition, support and a voice for those of us who practise the craft of playwork. It can be the mirror we need to show us who we are so that we can  look with pride on our image.

With no staff and negligible funding, the Foundation is nevertheless struggling on all our behalf with some of the thorny problems associated with the current turmoil around accredited training; and working with others to advocate for the policy changes the sector needs. But it can be a great deal more. It can share writing from those of us who like to write. It can hold images and papers and anything else we decide we need: memes on social media; information; ideas; resources.

The Foundation can be whatever we need it to be. Let’s make it our shared campfire. To do this it needs us to support it, to chip in, to use our voice and our enterprise. It is true that there is a cost element, which is a challenge to those of us living hand-to-mouth on playworker wages, but here is an opportunity, a chance to strengthen our voice and to find common ground; to turn away from the frustrations and infighting that shames and holds back our profession; to stand tall and move on.

Penny Wilson

Photo: Meriden Adventure Playground

Politics, playwork and neo-liberalism

NO. 1 IN AN ORIGINAL SERIES OF PAMPHLETS BY GORDON STURROCK

In this first of an original series of pamphlets, the UK playwork scholar Gordon Sturrock argues that avoiding the political implications of playwork practice will lead to its continuing, inevitable demise. Nor should we water our politics down to accommodate more dominant discourses. Instead, he argues, the field must vigorously embrace its true ethos, and so offer a vital alternative to the neo-liberal colonisation of education – and the wider public realm – to the rapacious capitalist project.

READ THE FULL PAMPHLET HERE

Gordon Sturrock is a playwork theorist and writer. He is co-author, with the late Perry Else, of The Play Cycle: An Introduction to Psycholudics (The Colorado Paper), and The Therapeutic Playwork Reader.

Photo: Meriden Adventure Playground

Flying the flag for playwork

Report of the chair of The Playwork Foundation, Karen Benjamin, to the charity’s first annual general meeting, held on 8th March 2019.

The Playwork Foundation was officially launched on 8th November 2017 at Goldsmiths College, University of London with presentations from Professor Fraser Brown, Penny Wilson, Adrian Voce and Meynell, who also streamed the event live for those who could not attend on the day.

In January 2018 The Playwork Foundation achieved charitable status and in March 2018 members of the Board held a consultation session at the National Playwork Conference to discuss what the sector wanted from The Foundation creating a wealth of material from which we are continuing to work on as part of our business development plan.

These ‘asks’ also helped focus some of the questions for the Roadshows.

In 2018 we collaborated with Play England to co-deliver on 4 Roadshows around the country.  These were held in Bristol, at Shiremoor Adventure Playground, in Dudley at Sycamore Adventure and in London – as part of a Policy ask for the sector. There is much work to do on the information collated from these events and there have been further talks with Play England about how to take this forward into policy.

There are different areas and actions for each organisation to take forward, as well as collaboration in meetings with key people and specific campaigns for the playwork sector.

Over the past year we have written letters in support of the playwork sector to Bristol City Council and also given written support to the continuation of playwork qualifications, and members of the Board have also been instrumental in supporting the development of a playwork apprenticeship.

We are working on the development of our policies, currently having a Code of Conduct agreement, and a safeguarding and GDPR policy, but there is more work to do and we are grateful to all those organisations who have shared their policies with us for us to adapt or mirror accordingly.

There are challenges ahead for playwork which include the retention of qualifications, endorsement for training courses and funding for playwork services.

The challenge for The Playwork Foundation is to ensure that we are sustainable, that we can generate enough support from members and that we can secure funding to enable us to deliver on a work programme that will meet our overall aim to represent playwork and playworkers.

I would like to thank the Board of Trustees for their commitment and their contributions, in particular Adrian for his work on the website and to Ali for her work with The Trailblazer group.

Moving forward we need to keep the momentum going and we need a strong and dedicated board of trustees who are prepared to work together to develop a business plan, to secure some project funding, to deliver a regular newsletter to our members and overall keep playwork and playworkers at the forefront of local, regional and national thinking.

Karen Benjamin
Chair of the Board of Trustees
March 8th 2019     

Photo: Karen Benjamin and Ali Wood at the launch of the charity in November 2017.