The Playwork Foundation

The Playwork Foundation and Play England have announced a series of joint events over the coming months, to consult the play and playwork fields in England on a new ‘manifesto for play’ ahead of the next general election.

Forums will take place across the country to:
• consult with the play sector and develop key policy asks to form a manifesto for play
• coordinate campaigning for better play provision
• share latest thinking and developments in play provision

Policy areas to be developed include:

• Design and environment
• Staffed play provision
• Qualifications and training
• Schools

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Monday 4 June

Hosted by Bristol City Council and Bristol Play Network
Venue: Bristol Town Hall, College Green, Bristol BS1 5TR

More information about the Bristol event, including how to register, here

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Thursday 12 July

Hosted by Shiremoor Adventure Playground
Shiremoor Adventure Playground , Brenkley Ave, Shiremoor, Newcastle upon Tyne NE27 0PR

Wednesday 5 September

Hosted by Sycamore Adventure Playground
Sycamore Adventure Playground , Sycamore Green, Dudley, West Midlands, DY1 3QE

Thursday 4 October

Hosted by Hackney Play Association, London
Homerton Adventure Playground, Wardle Street, London E9 6BX

More information and booking details for these events will be published soon

 

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The Playwork Foundation has been awarded registered charity status by the Charity Commission.

Trustees of the new charity, which launched as a membership body in November 2017, said that its registration now completes the first stage of a long-term project to create a new vehicle that can make the case for playwork services, help develop the playwork approach and provide a representative platform for playwork practitioners.

The new organisation, they said, will promote the value of playwork, support playworkers and advocate for children’s play. Ultimately it will aim to re-establish playwork as a recognised professional practice throughout the UK, and create a professional body of playwork practitioners.

The Playwork Foundation was developed by a steering group, from 2015-17 after a survey of the field overwhelmingly supported the idea.

Karen Benjamin, chair of the Board of Trustees, said:

“This is very good news. Our board has worked very hard, with no funding, for 2-3 years to reach this point. We were given a mandate by our colleagues in the playwork field to build a new vehicle for our profession and this recognition by the Charity Commission means that the vehicle is now ready to hit the road.

We are at the start of a long journey to secure the recognition and support for playwork that it deserves, and which children need. Becoming a registered charity means that we can now begin to raise the funds for this vital work. We are very excited about the possibilities.”

The board’s statement continues:

“This is great news for playworkers and ultimately for children. As Professor Fraser Brown said at our launch event in November, playwork is a unique approach to working with children – one that actively empowers them, rather than aiming to direct or mould them. The value and importance of children’s play is widely under-recognised or misunderstood and children’s lives are increasingly structured and proscribed. The playwork approach is the antidote. We want to secure the recognition and the resources the profession needs to reach more of the countless numbers of children who could benefit from it.

“One important message as we pass this milestone, especially to our members and others in the field, is that the trustees do not presume to be the arbiters or directors of our practice, how it develops or how it should be represented. We are merely filling the necessary role of being accountable as the governing body for a bespoke playwork vehicle.

“We hope the field will now join us in constructing and populating the type of structures, processes and fora our profession needs, and which in the past, in England, we have relied on other organisations, with different agendas, to provide.

“Without staff or funding this has been a slow-build project and we appreciate everyone’s patience and understanding about that, but the work to develop the capacity we need for this important mission can now begin in earnest”.

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The Playwork Foundation
Registered charity no. 1176557

You can support the Playwork Foundation by becoming a member here

 

Playwork Partnerships and the Drama Department of the University of Gloucestershire have been working for the past year on developing ARTPAD (Achieving Resilience Through Play and Drama) – a training course for teachers, youth workers and playworkers that explores how to use drama techniques and understand children’s play in order to support the development of resilience in children and young people.

Based on research undertaken in the UK and the partner countries of Hungary, Germany, Poland and Austria, core principles were developed that highlighted the environment, the role of the adult and alignment amongst others, as essential components for the training course.

The overall aim of the project is to help re-engage children and young people in formal, informal and non-formal education who, for whatever reason, have disengaged with learning by developing specialised training for those that work with them and support them. This will include understanding a range of drama approaches that can be used, alongside an understanding of the importance of understanding and providing time and space for play. The final course will be a University Module endorsed through the University of Gloucestershire and the University of Gdansk.

In March the course will be piloted in Poland with experienced trainers and practitioners from all five countries, including from the UK alongside the Drama Department: trainer and facilitator Pete Duncan; Playworker and Trainer Tony Delahoy of Play Torbay; Playworker, Youth worker and trainer Simbi Folarin from DENS of Equality.

The 30 hour course will be delivered over a week with time for reflection and feedback before pilot courses are run by the trainers in each partner country. Wendy Russell from the University of Gloucestershire is evaluating the whole project which will finally be disseminated in Budapest this summer.

Karen Benjamin

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ARTPAD Introductory Event

Tuesday 24 April  3.30 – 6.00pm
at the University of Gloucestershire.

The event will introduce ARTPAD and the training course with Guest Speaker Kate Cairns, Author of ‘Attachment, Trauma and Resilience’.

If you are interested in attending please contact Karen Benjamin at kbenjamin@glos.ac.uk or check out the website www.artpadproject.eu

Bloomsbury has published the second edition of the popular Reflective Playwork, by Ali Wood and Jacky Kilvington.

The authors say that the extensive new content means the book is now aimed at anyone – parent or professional – who wants to better understand play from a child’s perspective, and how to support it using the playwork approach.

The publisher says the second edition is ‘full of anecdotes, practical examples and real-life stories of children playing wherever they find themselves, making it a fascinating as well as informative read.

‘It also gives links to new on-line case-studies that enable other professionals to rethink and reflect on using a supportive rather than a supervisory role in their own settings’.

Ali Wood*, co-author of Reflective Playwork, describes the second edition

In a world where we are ever seeking to protect our children and to encourage their educational progress, it is often overlooked that the need for play is as important as the need for food and sleep. Drawing on playwork methodology, theory and practice, this extensively revised new edition of Reflective Playwork recognises that play is a need for all, and seeks to encourage the provision of time and space for all children to freely enjoy its benefits.

This edition has a greater focus on putting playwork theory into practice to address the needs of all those who work with children and play. Using more stories and case studies from real life situations and a wider range of settings including schools, children’s centres, voluntary organisations and play therapy, Jacky Kilvington and Ali Wood help readers identify how to use the playwork approach and engage in reflective practice whoever and wherever they are.

New and updated for this edition

• Key questions, reflection opportunities and further reading suggestions have been updated to include the latest research, terminology and current concerns for children and young people;
• An updated glossary highlighting key playwork terminology;
• A new chapter on playable spaces;
• A new chapter on applying the playwork approach in other professions in the children’s workforce, and within continuing professional development
• A wider look at play and playwork across the Western world;
• A renewed focus on showing links between playwork practice and other types of practice.

*Ali Wood is a trustee of the Playwork Foundation. This article is written in her personal capacity.

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Reflective Playwork – For all who work with children,  by Ali Wood and Jacky Kilvington, is published by Bloomsbury.

To order a discounted copy visit Meynell Games Books

 

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Reviews for Reflective Playwork

“This new edition strongly validates both children’s play and the reflective practices of adults who support children’s play. But perhaps more importantly, this text is a treasure trove of resources and examples that should resonate with those who teach playwork, those who are students in a field of childhood studies, and just about anyone interested in improving their effectiveness in working with children.”

–  Sue Marie Wright, Professor of Children’s Studies, Eastern Washington University, USA

“This much revised second edition is full of beautiful observations about the daily reality of children’s play, and the challenges facing those who work with children. The authors manage to make difficult concepts accessible, and I especially enjoyed their many reflections all firmly rooted in personal experience.”

–  Fraser Brown, Professor of Playwork, Leeds Beckett University, UK

“If you work with playing children or spend time with them you will be in no doubt that playing is important to children but often bemusing to adults. This book presents a comprehensive range of accessible information on the subjects of play, how we might better understand it, and work with it. If you care about children, you care about play and you should read this book.”

–  Ben Tawil, Senior Lecturer in Playwork, Leeds Beckett University, UK

 

Gordon Sturrock here responds to Professor Fraser Brown’s paper, ‘What is unique about playwork?’, which was based on the latter’s presentation to the launch of the Playwork Foundation in November 2017.

These unique characteristics for our work require some considerable evaluation. For the sake of brevity, I’ll take the final proposition and use it as a focal point for all the statements.

To recap: the final characteristic identified in Brown’s commentary states that playwork requires ‘a continuous commitment to deep personal reflection that manages the internal relationship of the playworker’s present and child-self and the effects of that relationship on their current practice.’

To approach my interpretation I will use, not ‘unconditional positive regard’ (UPR) – a proposed method in Brown’s original piece – but ‘conditional, unconditional positive regard’.

Here lies the difference: the primary usage of UPR is drawn from a context of counselling. It is a therapeutic method from within a broader application and practice. This ensures that the 45-minute, one-to-one encounter of therapist and client can invoke UPR stances, due to the fact that it is set into a supportive framework of reflection, and significant supervisory containment. This operational capacity to reflect is not conditional to practice but obligatory. None of this background has congruence with the demands of our work.

To dislocate the UPR idea by its wholesale adoption as a practice application requires major rethinking of the playwork task. Elsewhere in his piece Brown advances the notion of the ‘selfless’ playworker. This requirement is a behavioural absurdity. Our work should be peopled, and the practice enshrined in the complete immersion of the growth and self-development of the playworker in the interactions with the children in the playspace.

“The absolute uniqueness of our work rests in our reflection”

Throughout these statements there appears to be recourse to reflection as being a concomitant but adjacent responsibility of the playwork task. The absolute uniqueness of our work rests in our reflection, seen as not simply a post-session meditation, but the essential source of our working method. Our reflection is directly active in our encounters with the playing child. Our work is in our consequential but passive interrogation of responses and reactions.

The best motivation for ‘continuous commitment’ in playwork is to ensure that self-development, through insights into the meaning of the children’s play – their interpretive derivations – are seen as allowing similar excursions into the psyches and well-being of the playworker. Without departing into an adjacent argument this is an essentially hermeneutic operational modality.

I find it difficult to accept the need to separate the overall construct of ‘being and becoming’. How do we, in practice, approach this distinction? Wilber insists that ‘the past and future exfoliate out of the present’. What psychic surgery is required to arrive at the offered accommodation?

“we can only approach our encounters with play and playing through our interpretations of meaning”

There is a positional, scopic perspective here, which underlies the statements. This deserves some comments. In some ways it might be most useful to look at it by means of a reversal of the lens. Playwork is entirely participatory. There is immersion in incalculable complexities of operation. This material is abundantly in advance of the therapies more generally. Absent neurological analysis, we can only approach our encounters with play and playing through our interpretations of meaning. It is from the scrutiny of that meaning, its sourcing and our derived translations – the precise overlapping of the self-development of the child and the playworker – that our unique method arises.

As an exercise, were we able to describe our affective analysis of the field’s present state, and apply the same exercise to the plight of the children we are dealing with, we would find considerable consistency and congruence.

There is a further context requiring explication. I believe we have a political obligation that arises from and should be included in our uniqueness of practice. Playwork and its benefits are most actively needed in what we might usefully acknowledge as the precariat.

“we may be the first precariat profession…and should be proud of it”

We work predominantly in precariat environments and habitats. We may be the first precariat profession – irrespective of the major rethinking necessary to a stepping out of traditional career structures and status considerations – and should be proud of it. It is perfectly possible to locate and propagate self-development agendas for the child and playworker as a statement of post-work, political intent.

I believe that the great debate lying at the heart of our practice and its continuance may require us to transcend current interpretations of the task. There is a narrative that could move the field in entirely new directions and dimensions of practice. This may demand of us crucial and farsighted meditations of a deeply personal nature. We have created praxis norms that centre on ‘what does the child get out of playing.’ That coda should now include ‘what do we get’ out of that contact.

Gordon Sturrock

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 and The Therapeutic Playwork Reader.

Fraser Brown’s paper What is Unique about Playwork? can be read here