OPAL Playground Redevelopment

We are proud and excited to have started a two year re-development project aimed at improving the quality of our breaktimes and lunchtimes every single day for every single child. OPAL are a charity that work with schools to support them to understand the importance of play and how to use their grounds, resources and facilities to improve the quality of play for each child.  Our goal:

Amazing playtimes, every day, for every child!

Play makes up 20% of each child’s time in primary school, and we believe that we should give us much thought to planning our play experiences as we do to our curriculum experiences.  Play is the primary way that children learn: through play they learn social interaction, relationship development, sensible risk taking and good judgement, physical development, communication skills and much much more.  It is the curriculum that cannot be taught – children need to have every opportunity to discover these skills for themselves.

Children have not changed, but childhood has.  Many of us experienced childhoods that were more independent with greater time away from adults, more ability to make our own choices, more freedom in our local area, more physical activity and certainly less time away from screens.  We need to ensure that our children have every opportunity to discover the benefits of play that are missing from many aspects of childhood today. A diminished play experience can lead to a culture of fear, lack of resilience, less risk taking, more fear, less activity and increased mental health issues amongst children.  The benefits of play include:

•Strength and endurance

•Whole body coordination

•Emotional attachment

•Emotional and social skills

•Hand-eye coordination

•Thinking, reasoning, problem solving

•Early language development

•Communication skills

•Literacy

•Numeracy

•Artistic creativity

•Narrative skills

•Social and group work skills

•Understanding rules

•Discussion skills

•Mental representation

Self-regulation: the ability to be aware of and regulate one’s own cognitive and emotional states and behaviour.

When our children are happier outside the classroom, they will be happier inside the classroom, and once our OPAL process is fully operational, we hope that better play will lead to more play, more positive social interactions, more inclusion and more learning in the classroom.