Earlier this year, the Play Commission put out a call for evidence and expertise to inform the policy recommendations in their final report. The key questions they wanted answered were:
- How do we boost learning through play?
- How do we expand places and environments where children can play?
- How can we use children’s right to play to ensure national and local government support children’s play?
- How do we provide children and families with more time to play?
- How do we harness technology and the digital world to boost children’s play?
- How do we encourage parents to play with their children and to encourage their children to play in the offline world?
PEDAL’s Soizic Le Courtois and Manogya Sahay worked with PhD student Qiming Liu on a submission entitled Supporting Learning Through Play. The key points from their submission are summarised below and you can click the link at the bottom of the article to download a copy of the full report:
- Play can take many forms but not all children like to play in the same way.
- Play is in the eye of the beholder: it is only play if children experience it as play.
- Play has many benefits for children’s learning and development, but these may be different depending on the kind of play – we need to be careful not to overgeneralise.
- Adults (e.g. teachers and parents) can play an important role in supporting children’s learning through play, but they should be partners in play and not take over with an adult agenda.
- Playful learning may not look like typical play but has its essential characteristics: children’s agency and motivation. This might include projects and self-directed learning. Playful learning should sit alongside (not replace) free play, which is a vital form of rest and leisure.
- There has been a recent tendency to “schoolify” play in order to meet school objectives, or to make school activities superficially game-like to make them more appealing (“chocolate-covered broccoli”). This goes against the principles of what play is, and risks undermining efforts to improve children’s access to play and learning through play.
- Accountability and policy pressures lead teachers to tightly control what children learn, instead of giving them agency in their learning. These pressures also limit opportunities for genuine play.
