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.
The UK Playwork NOS Consortium is inviting tender applications for the 2022 Playwork National Occupational Standards (NOS) Scoping Project.
The aim of the scoping project is to identify:
key organisations and stakeholders in a future review of the Playwork NOS
identify any nation specific drivers and blockers and make recommendations on the direction of a future NOS review.
The consortium wants to undertake a scoping exercise to ensure that the respective needs of the four nations are reflected in future plans. The intention is to undertake preparatory work during 2022 to meet the requirements of the UK Standards and Frameworks programme and for the UK Playwork NOS Consortium to be added to the NOS Supplier Framework.
The UK Playwork NOS Consortium has been established by Play Wales, Play England, Play Scotland, PlayBoard Northern Ireland and The Playwork Foundation to bid for, or identify, funding for a future review of the Playwork NOS.
The budget for the scoping project is £2,500 (including VAT).
Closing date for submitting expressions of interest: 12:00pm 9 September 2022
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.
· The state of playwork across the UK by each of the four national play organisations
· Pete King on his post-Covid research with playworkers
· Sion & Penny on ‘Playwork in Progress’ reflection sessions
· Ali & Barbara on Playwork Training and Qualifications
5. The Playwork Foundation’s future plans
6. The future of Playwork – some provocations
All members are invited to attend to see the great presentations we have lined up, and take part in the debate about the future of playwork. Please reply to aliwood@blueyonder.co.uk who will send you reports and log-in details nearer the time.
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/
Nearly halfway through the Year of Childhood for 2021, which includes becoming the first nation in the world to directly incorporate the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) into domestic law, Scots will be heading to the polls to elect a new Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government.
Scottish Out of School Care Network has gathered the manifesto commitments of the five main political parties in the Scottish Parliament relating to school-age childcare.
Issues affecting children that might impact on how parents vote in the Scottish election include testing of both senior and primary 1 pupils with the process for exams coming under fire and the whole idea that primary 1’s be tested after missing so much school being very unpopular.
Another contentious issue is school starting age in general but very specifically there is a bit of a postcode lottery with regard to deferred entry for children who don’t automatically get a deferred place (and an extra year of pre-school education) because they are born slightly earlier in the school year and this is a particular issue for children who were premature babies.
Of course, we won’t know if these factors have any bearing on how parents vote but it’s interesting to speculate.
In this original article, one of the country’s leading experts in children’s outdoor play, Rob Wheway, criticises the UK Government for neglecting children’s development, suggesting that the Covid-19 restrictions further increase the damage to their physical and mental health.
The UK Government’s exclusive focus on school-based education, ignoring children’s out-of-school activity, is damaging. It wrongly assumes that school education is sufficient for children’s development. The idea of extending the school day in England confirms this bias.
This fixation on school-focused education, at the expense of a wider view of child development, is puzzling. Children have nearly as many days for play (175) as days for school (190) each year. Even on school days, they have hours for play after school. Covid restrictions have increased the hours but restricted the opportunities.
Clearly, time for play is a larger portion of children’s lives than school. It is also the opportunity for children to develop some of their abilities in ways that are much more effective than school-based education. The most obvious of these is exercise. When they can play out, children do get a lot of exercise. Some of this is fast, such as tag-type games; some is sporadic, such as hide-and-seek and riding scooters or bikes; ball games give co-ordination; imaginative play often involves running around in a magical world from which adults are excluded. Where children can play out in safety, e.g. in small cul-de-sacs, children as young as 4 learn to cycle on 2-wheeled bikes without stabilizers.
Achieved without adults
All this exercise is done willingly, for the fun of it, rather than to achieve tested stages. In all these ways, for long periods of time, children who can play out, get more exercise than they do at school. It is achieved without adults needing to be there.
Less obvious than exercise is the social development children gain from play. When playing they have to organise the activity, make the rules, set the boundaries, settle disputes, reach compromises, make up after upsets. They have to be honest and give themselves up when they are out. If a friend arrives with two younger siblings they have to work out how to integrate them into the game.
Some children are lucky enough to live near an adventure playground where they can play freely. The playworker’s role is to enable rather than to organise the children. In this way children can build dens, use real tools, light fires. They can have more adventurous activities than on a conventional playground.
These benefits from play are there precisely because adults are NOT organising what happens. In play, adults do not follow a curriculum that is tested at various stages. Children take the initiative and organise themselves. They learn naturally what will give the most fun and fulfilment. We take the social development of all this sophisticated agreement-making for granted because children have always done it for themselves, throughout the ages.
What’s gone wrong?
So what’s gone wrong? There has been a massive environmental problem that is unrecognised. For generations, people had public open space just outside the home, where adults could walk and talk, and children could play. It was called the street. But now the car has been allowed to dominate even residential side roads. The result is that children cannot play out, and so they are less fit, more obese and less emotionally resilient than previous generations. Parents are blamed for wrapping their children in cotton wool and stopping them from playing, but they are in fact making sensible decisions to keep their children away from the danger of fast cars.
Covid restrictions have made matters worse and governments refuse to recognise that the increasing problems of damaged physical and mental health are caused by the lack of freedom to play – NOT a lack of school.
Playgrounds are valuable, but less than 10 per cent of children have access to a playground where they can play freely every day. The government in England is ignoring the other 90 per cent. Town parks or destination playgrounds are great as family facilities, but only for the one or two occasions per week when parents have time to take their children.
Restricting traffic
The Government makes the classic mistake of concentrating on outputs (number of playgrounds) rather than outcomes (can children play freely every day). The number of playgrounds is counted whether or not children can access them in safety. A strategy of restricting traffic on side roads would permit children to play out. They would be in small numbers and in the outdoors so would be safer than going back to crowded indoor classrooms.
Playing is a vital part of children’s development. Given a chance, it is what they will happily do for hours on end. It’s a natural part of their development. Of course, they will spend time on computer games, but as the previous generation found when radio and TV emerged, they still wanted to get out and play.
In summary, freedom to play outside, but close to home, is vital for children’s healthy development. Ignoring it is damaging children’s physical and mental health.
The Playwork Foundation is to play a supporting role in the new play conference, Play 2021, being organised by Playful Planet and the University of Birmingham on 7-8 July.
Play 2021, a conference on children, play and space, will be an online event but the organisers are also hopeful that in-person delegates will be allowed by the summer, and space has been booked for it on the university campus. Those registering for the online event now will have the option to upgrade to an actual seat at the conference as and when this is confirmed.
There is a call for papers for the conference, including from playwork practitioners and researchers, with playwork one of the themes of the event. The Playwork Foundation will join the conference committee to help curate this strand.
The event’s first speakers have been confirmed:
Tim Gill, the longstanding campaigner and writer on play and child-friendly environments, and author of the new RIBA publication Urban Playground;
Professor Helen Dodd, from the University of Reading, whose research on play and the pandemic has featured prominently in debates about the government response;
Ash Perrin, founder of the Flying Seagull Seagull project, which takes playfulness to children living in some of the world’s most troubled and deprived communities.
More speakers will be announced soon. Follow the Playful Planet site for regular conference updates.
The Playwork Foundation 