The Playwork Foundation would love to hear from you all about your summers.
You could share a photo or series of photos, a video piece, a poem, story or diary, artwork, a musical, street art, five minute presentations….it doesn’t really matter, but something from you that tells us what you want to share about your work in the holidays.
We will gather these and share them on our brand shiny new website and in another open meeting in September. We have seen loads of great examples of the documentation of play, from Meriden Adventure Playground for example, and from Gwealan Tops.
Part of the work of the Playwork Foundation is to celebrate the genuine passion and inspiration we have for our work. As far as we know there has never been a collection of our responses to the summer holidays, the busiest time of the year for our sector. So this shared collage, gallery, exhibition, showcasing of our work would not only be a way of building up a reference base, feeding real life examples into a shared pool of wisdom, but it would be a simple cost free way of the Playwork Foundation honouring our work.
So while you spend time this summer, being alongside children playing, if words or an image or artwork or interpretive dance spring into you mind to help you capture the moment perfectly, we will be utterly delighted to celebrate those moments with you.
Playday is the national day for play, celebrated each year across the UK on the first Wednesday in August. Playday 2022 will be celebrated on Wednesday 3 August. The theme for this year’s Playday is …
All to play for – building play opportunities for all children.
For the latest updates on this year’s campaign follow Playday on Facebook and our new Twitter account and share your plans using the hashtags #Playday2022 and #AllToPlayFor.
Over 60 people booked for our 2022 Playwork Foundation Open meeting. Many thanks to our speakers:
Margarite Hunter-Blair – Play Scotland
Martin King-Sheard – Play Wales
Alan Herron – Play Board Northern Ireland
Libby Truscott – Play England
Paul Hocker – London Play
Ali Wood – Meriden Adventure Playground
Penny Wilson & Sion Edwards – Wrexham City of Play
Also a big thank you to Sion Edwards – The Playwork Foundation’s new chair – for facilitating the meeting.
If you missed out or want to listen again an audio recording of the meeting is available here.
If you want to find out about future meetings, consider become a member of The Playwork Foundation and you’ll be added to our mailing list. Head over to our membership page for more information.
The PARS Community has developed a wide range of CPD activities for PARS practitioners and academics and practitioners from any discipline interested in the practice of playwork.
Tomorrow is set to be a bumper election day in Great Britain!
In England alone, there will be local council elections, mayoral elections, Mayor of London elections, London Assembly elections and Police & Crime Commissioner* elections. Some of these are elections that were postponed in 2020 due to the outbreak of COVID-19.
*Police & Crime Commissioner elections will also be taking place in Wales. Did you know that Wales and England share a single jurisdiction but have two legislatures? Something unique in the world.
As if that wasn’t enough elections for one day, there will also be a Senedd Cymru/Welsh Parliament election and a Scottish Parliamentary election. This article will look at the Senedd elections – fellow Trustee, Ann-marie, has written a piece on the Scottish Parliamentary election which you can read here. If you’re unfamiliar, this short video explains the powers of the Senedd.
This year’s Senedd election is nothing short of historic! Thanks to the ‘Senedd Election Act 2020’, 16 and 17 year-olds will be able to vote for the first time as well as an estimated 33,000 foreign nationals gaining the right to vote – this represents the biggest expansion of the franchise since 1969, when suffrage was extended to 18 to 21 year-olds, and will undoubtedly impact on the results of the election.
So, what do the parties say about play and playwork for #Senedd2021?
Whilst a number of parties have progressive manifesto promises for children and young people, only the Wales Green Party and Welsh Liberal Democrats specifically reference “play”, albeit in the context of early years education in both cases. Questions to Plaid Cymru leader, Adam Price, on play, also returned responses linking to education and early years. Despite no mention of it in their manifesto, it could be argued that, as it was a Welsh Labour Government that produced The Children and Families (Wales) Measure 2010, that gave us the Play Sufficiency Duty, and their record in supporting play in recent years, that Labour will likely continue this commitment.
Whatever the party-political make-up of the new Welsh parliament and government next week, a number of organisations have made it clear to all of them what they believe should be done to protect the rights of children in Wales, including their right to play.
First, we look at our national play board, Play Wales, and their manifesto “Wales – a play friendly place”. The headline asks are for the continuation of the Play Sufficiency Duty and for the opportunities for children to play to “increase and improve”. The dominance of the motor vehicle is addressed, with recommendations for default 20mph speed limits in built-up areas and government-mandated guidance for street play projects. Looking at schools, Play Wales propose a mandatory minimum time for “play breaks” within the school day and also ask for consideration, wherever practical, to making outdoor school grounds available for play after school and at weekends. Play Wales also call for a public campaign that not only explains what play is but also communicates the health and wellbeing benefits for children and wider society.
The Children’s Commissioner for Wales’s Manifesto briefly mentions play, asking for “more youth and play services that anyone can use, for free”. However it does go a little further by giving a vision of the future with “free adventure playgrounds all over the country”! This year will see the end of the current Commissioner’s tenure – we hope that the next Commissioner will be just as welcoming to play and playwork as Sally has been.
Clybiau Plant Cymru Kids’ Club appear to be the only organisation making very specific representations on behalf of playworkers. Specifically, they call for: the “continued investment in professionalisation of the sector” via funding, CPD and access to training and qualifications; recognition of playworkers’ influence on children’s lives and the Welsh economy to be “recognised in all government communications and policy decisions”; parity with Early Years workers through an “active and effective sector skills council”; and a call for more initiatives that support fair remuneration for playworkers (e.g. tax-free childcare, the childcare offer and 100% rates relief).
The Play Sufficiency Duty and legislation like the world-first Well-being of Future Generations Act, are indicative of how progressive governments can make a real difference to children and young people’s lives in a meaningful and sustainable way and on a national scale. However, any incoming Welsh Government will still be restricted by the allocation of funding set by the UK Government and by the reservation of powers over aspects of media, health and safety legislation, employment and regulation of charities.
In the coming months, The Playwork Foundation will be revisiting ‘A Manifesto for Play: Policy proposals for children’s play in England’ that was written in partnership with Play England and IPA England ahead of the 2019 UK General Election. Taking into consideration the composition of the new parliaments and governments in Wales and Scotland following national elections, and the shifting of the political map in England as a result of local elections, we hope to present a vision for the future of playwork that can influence and encourage each nation of the UK to not only recognise the profession but utilise our expertise and practice to the benefit of children and young people in every corner of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
If you’re living in Wales and wondering who to vote for, the BBC have put together this guide, or, for those in Scotland and England voting this Thursday, you can find out about all the elections, candidates and parties by visiting https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/
As practitioner-led structure building declines, Rob Wheway of the Children’s Play Advisory Service explains how inspection training is part of a renaisance of this quintessential feature of the traditional adventure playground.
Over the course of its history, adventure play has had a variety of attributes promulgated as its defining practice ethos, with different aspects taking prominence at different times, as fashion – both in playwork and in the wider zeitgeist – fluctuates. First ‘risky play’ takes the limelight, then ‘creative play’, before ‘natural play’ wrestles it away for a while … and so it goes on.
Whichever way the zeitgeist goes, though, it is an abiding characteristic of adventure playgrounds that they are made and built by playworkers. The ethos of adventure play is self-build: playworkers build them, and playworkers are responsible for them.
However, many playworkers are currently employed on adventure playgrounds that have either not been rebuilt for some years, or where contractors have been used in preference to training the workforce in the relevant skills.
Such practitioners, having had no role in the building of their playgrounds, are in a difficult position. This was highlighted of the recent case involving the failure of a piece of ‘self-build’ equipment (which had, in fact, been placed by a contractor) and which had not been adequately inspected. It was this case which probably propelled the furore with an insurance company a couple of years ago, and led to headlines that adventure play is too dangerous to insure.
Upskilling the workforce
The response to this turn of events could be to further deskill the workforce and deaden the adventure playground with rigidity – no more self-build, no more flexibility, no more children ‘spoiling’ bought equipment with hammers and nails … Or, it could be to develop further methodologies to overcome insurers’ fears and to upskill the workforce’s competence in caring for and developing the play environments they provide.
In pursuance of the latter, the short course ‘Inspecting your Adventure Playground’ has been developed by the Children’s Play Advisory Service, which is recognised as one of the foremost resources for health and safety expertise in both the fixed-equipment and adventure play fields.
This course is designed to provide a framework for playworkers to both perform operational inspections of their playsites, and keep an ongoing paper trail as evidence that due care has been taken to repair and maintain the attendant structures. This both ensures that the site remains in an acceptable state between annual inspections, and covers the organisation and workforce against claims of negligence in the event of unexpected and unforeseeable catastrophe.
Piloted with playworkers
The course has been piloted with playworkers running adventure playgrounds, mostly to a good reception. Participants have commented, “I thought the information given on this course was relevant in order for playworkers to have a better understanding of how to keep a playground safe” and, “Very informative… all adventure playground staff need this training.” However, there remains some confusion over operational inspection, dynamic risk assessment and annual, independent inspection.
The course is not a substitute for annual, independent, inspection by a competent and qualified person. Its methodology works in tandem with independent inspection and is intended to overcome the tendency, which overworked playworkers may have, to put the independent inspection, once completed, aside until the following year, in order to avoid the onerous and laborious tick-box sheets which can become robotic, not really checks at all; or the tendency to do the checks, but not to record them. Neither does its methodology work the same as dynamic risk assessment, which is a process for judging actions in the provision, rather than a system for recording the physical safety of the provision itself.
As there is currently no accrediting body for courses in playwork (which the Playwork Foundation and others are working to remedy) the current ‘Inspecting your Playground’ course does not carry a qualification. It does, however, both equip playworkers with the tools to prove competence should the need arise and, more importantly, mitigate against such eventualities by enabling them to be more fully responsible for their own sites.
Rob Wheway Children’s Play Advisory Service (CPAS)
For more information contact Rob Wheway, Director of CPAS. on whewayr@gmail.com or 024 7650 3540
Ali Wood of the Playwork Foundation adds…
The Playwork Foundation has heard from a number of playworkers in adventure playgrounds with self-build structures about how best to inspect and maintain these to ensure they remain safe. We, therefore, want to promote the course run by the Children’s Play Advisory Service, ‘Inspecting Adventure Playgrounds’ that enables playworkers to do just that.
At Meriden AP, for example (where I am a trustee), we are currently having to deal with a personal injury claim regarding a child who came on her first visit and broke her leg at the bottom of a slide constructed from large tunnel piping several years earlier. Had our staff not done this course with Rob Wheway and Simon Rix, we may well have had difficulty providing the necessary evidence for both the solicitor and the insurance company, to show we were not negligent in both checking and maintaining this slide and all our other structures in a meaningful way.
We were also able to call on Rob Wheway for the extra information we needed regarding what the law does and doesn’t require of us regarding self-build structures and his help was invaluable. I would really urge AP playworkers to do this course so you really know the ongoing condition of your structures both above and below ground and can be sure they are therefore safe.
Ali Wood
Ali Wood is a playwork trainer and writer who is a trustee both of the Playwork Foundation and Meriden Adventure Playground.
The All Wales Playworkers Forum has been running since 2007. Orginally established by Play Wales to provide a forum for those working in adventure playgrounds it has evolved to meet the needs of the sector. The Playworkers Forum is run by a dedicated steering group of playworkers, for playworkers. In the past a number of regional play associations took it in turns to administer the event with our collective aim being to keep the costs as low as possible, whilst bringing as many playworkers as possible together to share information, network and recharge our batteries. More recently, with the sad closure of the vast majority of the regional associations, Play Wales have taken over administration of the event on behalf of the sector, with the steering group working hard to keep things fresh and exciting for all participants from year to year.
Over the years we have toured around Wales, from as far south as the Gower Peninsula to as far north as Hawarden. We’ve made temporary homes in orchards, willow globes and big tops and generally we have almost always had the weather on our side. Anyone who’s ever attended will be fully aware of how much of a special event it has become in the playwork calendar. As our infrastructure has changed here in Wales, the forum has also been opened up to anyone from across the UK and it has brought playworkers together to share their unique experiences and support each other. The event has always been an overnighter, with participants camping out under the stars and often sat up into the small hours gazing at the glowing embers of our fire and putting the world to rights.
Over the years we’ve been lucky to attract some of the best playwork trainers, speakers and academics and they have all really helped to make the event what it is. We tend to have a blend of theoretical and practical sessions, normally focussed around an emerging or current hot topic. One of the annual highlights is without a doubt the ‘Annual Playwork Games’ hosted by Martin King-Sheard. Two teams of goblins and elves compete in a head to head to find out who will be crowned champions for the year ahead.
This years event was somewhat different from previous years, due to the lockdowns that sadly made meeting in person impossible. Instead, to ensure that we maintained continuity we all came together on 24th June 2020 for an online book club that was organised and facilitated by Play Wales. It was so much of a success that they are now continuing these for free as a monthly professional development opportunity for play and playwork professionals in Wales. Each month they select a freely available online paper, article or other publication relating to play and playwork for you to read and then you can join an hour’s discussion and reflection on the content. All Book Club meetings are held on the Zoom online meeting platform. More information is available here.
In the first book club, participants discussed the Play Wales guidance paper ‘dynamic risk management of common but potentially hazardous play behaviours’. This paper was written by Mike Barclay, Dave Bullough and Simon Bazley. The paper is available for free download here.
The event was facilitated by Martin King-Sheard and Marianne Mannello from Play Wales, who also ran a ‘Q and A’ session with one of the papers authors, Simon Bazley. The successful event was then followed by an online version of the playworker games where contestants competed to find out who would be crowned champions for 2020. It was a close call with competitors racing around their houses to undertake a series of challenges and games. In the end the mighty elves came through victorious once again, just beating the goblins in the last game.
Anyone interested in attending future events should keep an eye out on the Play Wales website as we hope to be back to meeting in person once again in 2021 if local and national restrictions allow.
Dr Pete King of Swansea University is researching the playwork field’s response to the pandemic and has two opportunities to get involved.
Adventure Playgrounds
Dr. King is looking for anyone involved in adventure playground to take part in a study on how adventure playgrounds have been adapted since post-lockdown measures were put in place in July 2020. The research study will involve a short 20-30 minutes interview using Zoom. If you would like to take part, please contact Pete at p.f.king@swansea.ac.uk where you can be sent more information about the study. The research study has ethical approval from the College of Human and Health Science at Swansea University.
After-school clubs or holiday playschemes
Dr. King is also looking for anyone involved in afterschool clubs or holiday playschemes to take part in a study on how you have adapted since post-lockdown measures were put in place in July 2020. The research study will involve you to take part and complete a short survey which can be accessed here.
Adele Cleaver trained as a playworker in Birmingham back in 2010. She calls herself “a nomadic Brummie” who after dabbling in playful adventures and community work in Leeds, London and Birmingham and Ghana, Portugal, Brazil, Uganda and Kenya now resides in Bournemouth on the south coast of England with her 4-year-old daughter and husband.
In November 2019 she started writing her first book which she describes as a part-memoir, part-manifesto on living a life full of play. She writes “accidentally stumbling into playwork was going to be the best voyage I was ever going to embark on”. We asked her a few questions about her playwork journey.
How did you become a playworker?
I think I was born a playworker. It just took me a long time to realise my way of being could also be a profession. My home was like a free play environment; a laidback pair of almost hippies for parents with 4 children, over 12-year age gap each with their respective friends over to play, and a multicultural backdrop beyond our doorstep. My mom was a teacher though openly criticised “the system” and longed for the 6 weeks holidays and my dad worked in Social Inclusion for the NHS so I was brought up to live inclusively, be weary of hierarchy and play freely. I went to the University of Leeds to study International Development because when I was 18 I naively thought I could save the world. I moved back to Birmingham and worked at a local youth project as a Youth Worker where I bumped into Laura Watts one of the radical women who founded Dens of Equality. She worked in the building next door, and took me under her wing because the youth project just wasn’t rebellious enough for me. After a few months of bid-writing and setting up family-led play projects around Birmingham, Laura sent me off to play with Ali Wood and Sue Smith and they turned me into a proper playworker with a capital P and a certificate to prove it.
Are you working on a play project in Bournemouth?
Yes, currently myself; I am my own play priority! The first few years of motherhood and juggling the chaos that a tiny new life brings reminded me that I needed to play more. Playful parents breed playful children so I’ve been prioritising us at home.
But even before motherhood, I took a rest from play when we moved out of London in 2014; not intentionally but because playworker jobs didn’t seem to exist down here. I needed work, couldn’t afford to be fussy so without giving it much thought ditched the play. I was an Autism Support Worker for a few years before I had my daughter and always tried to work more playfully, but there was no real understanding of play in the organisations I worked for. I felt I had become very institutionalised so I contacted The Prince’s Trust and set up a greetings card business with their support to learn new skills and feed my own creativity.
When I was pregnant we very almost moved to Bristol because I knew we could live more playfully there as a new family but I had fallen in love swimming in sea at the end of our road. So we stayed put and have started rooting here. I often described Dorset as a “play desert”. Apart from Fernheath Play as the little oasis, there isn’t much opportunity for playwork here. After I had my daughter I did Admin at a creative youth project locally in Bournemouth. I could see the glaringly obvious gap in the service provision; these young people weren’t accessing community play as children so they were being referred to us through CAMHS because there are no early intervention projects. I couldn’t handle office work so I left and decided to focus on building up Play here.
So now I am setting up, very slowly, a Community Interest Company called Real Playful. I am running a series of Family Nature Play sessions in collaboration with a local community garden this winter. I am super excited that so many families local to Boscombe are interested; all the workshops were fully booked within days. Then my next big job is to source playful people and train them up as playworkers so I am currently completing a very tedious application for employability funding. I’m really just relying on my book to become an international bestseller (any agents reading, please call me!!), I’ll be made a millionaire overnight and voila! I can fund all sorts of magical community play projects here, there and everywhere.
Where is your favourite place to play?
Hmmm, it varies. This year I have really genuinely loved being at home, playing in my PJs, all day with my daughter. Lockdown was good for us in that sense because I am a sociable being, and I like to be out and about, but the unstructured, timeless play got priority over my need to be with people. I thoroughly enjoyed being locked away in our own little adventure playground; it was necessary escapism! But if you’d asked me last year I would have said outdoors in the community. Big outdoor community play, mixed ages, multigenerational, loads of loose parts, street closures of festivals of play, neighbours laughing together, cups of tea being brought out onto the doorstep. I love the big colourful pop up play sessions I used to create with Parks 4 Play in Birmingham. It was physically demanding work, lugging tonnes of resources around Kings Heath park but it was so magical. That’s the sort of play I want to bring to Boscombe.
Where do you play outdoors?
Well we don’t have much of a garden except a little front hedge area which is big enough for a mud kitchen and my bicycle. I am not complaining, we live opposite a small charismatic Victorian park and 800m from the beach! 9 miles of glorious sand and a view over to the Purbeck Hills. I’ve always lived in cities and this is the closest I have ever lived to nature; life is good here even though I can only experience vibrant community play in my imagination…. I must remind myself that good things come to those who experience vibrant community play in their imagination!
I still really love going back to Brum and playing in my parent’s overgrown garden when I played as a child. I’m a proper city kid through and through, in terms of my exposure to diversity, multiculturalism and the arts, but I played and played and played in that garden and have a lot of happy memories. For as long as I remember my parents have fixed everything, and kept things ‘just in case they will be useful to fix other things….’ so their garden has always been full of loose parts. It is great, but also kind of a strange time-warp-come-parallel-universe to see my daughter explore freely with all the random stuff I did thirty years earlier.
If you could live in any era, when would you choose?
When people could play and cycle out on the roads without it being dangerous. I joined the Playing Out Activator group at the start of the year, just before lockdown and was so excited to hear of all these communities regularly playing out. And then through lockdown I was campaigning for “Quiet Streets” to be our “legacy of lockdown” in Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP Council) but Highways wouldn’t give us permission. It is so frustrating; without much publicity over 30 residents had expressed an interest, around 10 streets had self-organised stewards, signs and safety kits, but the powers-at-be just wouldn’t give the green light. It is so obvious to me that community playfulness is good for everyone; my council don’t use the same glasses I do.
What is your favourite word?
I am a linguist so I have 3! In English “Chaos”. Quelquefois (French for “sometimes”) and Bochechas (“cheeks” in Portuguese).
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Ohhh good question! An author, an artist and an architect. I think I’m almost there. I have just finished my first book, just need to get it published to make me a “real author”. Everyone is an artist, and those with confidence capitalise the A to make them official Artists and I build splendid dens so I guess that makes me an Architect. If I could go back to university I would definitely study urban design, architecture or planning; something to build more community play spaces in cities. Maybe I will go back to university…. Who knows?!
Finally, tell us a little bit about your book.
It is a part-memoir, part-manifesto about prioritising playtime for new parents and gifting our children unstructured family time. I write from my heart about inclusion, playful encounters in playwork settings, my own childhood play, playful parenting in Cuba and Montreal, miscarriage and multiculturalism.
Connect with Adele
therealplayfulmama@gmail.com
Facebook – Real Playful – Pop Up Community Play
Instagram the_real_playful_mama
Twitter @Adeleplayworker
And if you have any connections to the literary world please help her to circulate her proposal!
Trustee Ali Wood describes how Meriden Adventure Playground, in Chelmsley Wood in the West Midlands, is managing to continue its vital work through the Covid crisis
Like all other playgrounds, we had to close during the lockdown. We furloughed most of the staff but kept two on to stay in touch with the community and to help set up a new food bank and make deliveries – along with made-up play packs – to local families. We opened up again at the beginning of July, having spent weeks working out to how to do this safely without losing the power and fun of playing – we eventually set up an online booking system (which has been a nightmare to administrate) so that we could open to groups of 20 three times a day. We required adults to socially distance, but not the children and we also encouraged both children and parents to complete a questionnaire about how they had been feeling and playing during the lockdown.
A SPECTRUM OF EXPERIENCES
These have yielded some really interesting responses showing a whole spectrum of experiences – ranging from those who had a really tough tine and were still very worried right through to those who had loved being off school and having more time to play. It was interesting to see the correlation that matched up the most anxious children with the most fearful and stressed out parents… We also noticed initially that most of the children were more reticent than usual and it took a few sessions for them to get back to their gung-ho selves.
Being an outdoors only site did make things easier and by August we had nearly all the staff back and were up to 40 children a session and we had also formed a partnership with SOLAR – our local Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust – who have been paying for the exclusive use of the site twice a week with groups of children on their caseloads. It has been wonderful to see these isolated children particularly, forming friendships with others like them and building up confidence and competence and starting to open up and talk. This is a partnership we shall definitely be building on – the psychologists have a passion for free play and we are learning from each other and sharing good practice. Youth nights also started up halfway through July and moved up to 30 per session and attracting new young people we didn’t know.
A BUSY SUMMER
So it was a very busy summer interspersed with cameos of spraying disinfectant and dishing out hand sanitiser together with constantly explaining the ‘rules’ for limited numbers to parents who kept turning up at the gate. There has been a lot of ‘can we – can’t we?’ reflections along the way but confidence has grown all-round and despite things not being as they were, the magic and power of playing has definitely returned and feels great. We looked forward to the school term starting so we could build back up our unaccompanied regulars after-school – many of whom had not returned because they would normally have turned up here in the holidays all day and every day which has not been possible due to online booking. Many of them did return and we soon went back to offering food again as many of them were hungry.
We are now into the second national lockdown but have managed to stay open. After many conversations with both the police and with public health officials about the need to continue supporting kids, we have been allowed to open as long as there is a maximum of 15 ‘children or young people most in need’ present. That left us with a real conundrum – how could we decide who was most needy. We managed to structure things so that we have at least two sessions five days a week and are working on trying as far as possible to get the same kids at the same sessions so there is less ‘mingling’ (despite the fact that all these are kids are mingling on the streets after school and in the park). Despite the agreement we had forged, the local police force still came to disperse everyone at the first youth session last Thursday, but fortunately they listened and drove off and we are hoping that doesn’t keep happening.
We are also spending time having strategic discussions and planning for the future in response to the pandemic – we are exploring offering alternative education placements and more therapeutic play sessions as a means of reaching those children most in need, whilst earning extra much-needed income. These are not easy times for playwork!
Ali Wood Trustee, Meriden Adventure Playground
If anyone would like to buy our 2021 calendar for a fiver plus postage, that would be great as we are having to do this more by post this year! Email aliwood@meridenadventureplayground.com for one or more copies – all proceeds go towards feeding kids!
The Playwork Foundation 