Play here, there and everywhere

My kids just broke up from school for the summer.  Alongside the relief that the morning scramble is over for a time and a growing panic about filling four more weeks, I’ve been thinking back to my own summers, which looked nothing like theirs.

My best memories are all outdoors, and none of them were booked or supervised.  The most visceral and shining happened in a barn in Sussex, chasing a very cross turkey and hunting for eggs in the too tall piles of hay bales.  Unstructured, a bit risky, a beautiful (if time-limited) animal friendship.  That sort of play is vanishing: the Raising the Nation Play Commission found last year that 55% of parents think their child plays outside less than they did, which certainly rings true for me and the parents I know.

So, UK Community Foundations is backing Playday, coordinated Play Wales, Play Scotland and Playboard Northern Ireland which is the national day for play, today, and its theme ‘play here, there and everywhere’.  Kids don't only play in playgrounds, they play on the way to school, on the doorstep, at the shopping centre, and in the “between” spaces – both urban and rural.  The question is whether the places they live still let them.

That's what we've been working on.  20 of our community foundations will come together to launch Free to Play UK next spring – a new UK wide outdoor play initiative running over five years.  We have a great starting point of £10m already committed to the programme, and we're building it with Community Foundations of Canada, Play England, our learning partner Renaisi, and practitioner and academic experts in the UK and Canada.  It focuses on the play that's been squeezed out most: outdoor, child-led and adventurous.

Reflections from Lake Ontario

A few weeks ago, I spent a week in Toronto, soaking up the learning from our sister programme.  It included a day with the community foundations, technical partners and funded organisations running Free to Play in Canada.  We stayed outside as much as possible, on a small island on Lake Ontario, which felt like the right way to talk about it.

In the morning sun on the shore, we stood in a circle and shared our early memories of play.  Every single one was outdoors. Sandpits in Mumbai.  A barn a lot like mine. Hide and seek, street games, and secret dens.  Then the person running it said something that I’ve played over in my mind, and that I’ve heard repeatedly since: our generation has denied our kids that childhood.  We didn't mean to.  We just made a series of pragmatic calls about traffic, time and safety, alongside a pandemic, war, a climate emergency.  We handed our kids screens amidst a collective experience ourselves of the birth of social media, smart phones and now the agentic web.  And here we are.

Play as a human right, and the policy moment

Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child protects every child's right to play, rest and leisure.  In 2013, the UK Committee on the Rights of the Child clarified what governments must do to realise that right through General Comment No. 17.  To me, there’s a face validity and internal consistency to this statement and it’s why this initiative is one of the few things I've worked on that almost nobody questions, whatever their politics, education or vocation.  Play isn’t just important for development, resilience and health – it’s also essential for a happy fulfilling childhood and is the most important part of most children’s lives when asked.  Children’s right to play must be protected: the evidence is becoming clearer and clearer.

England had a national play strategy once, with public and private resource behind it; but when it was scrapped in 2010 most of the infrastructure went with it.  Wales and Scotland have both taken stronger legislative approaches, including Play Sufficiency duties and incorporating the UNCRC into domestic law, while Northern Ireland has continued to maintain a stronger strategic focus on play than England.  This programme is launching in a moment of opportunity: thanks to the work of Play England and others, last year’s Play Commission “Everything to Play For” resulted in a final report with tangible recommendations.  Play has been climbing back up the agenda on other fronts too, through a revived all-party parliamentary group, the growing evidence base from researchers like Helen Dodd and Mariana Brussoni, and the under-16s social media ban.  The new prime minister has a track record on play: as Secretary of State for Children, he spearheaded (with Ed Balls) England’s only ever National Play Strategy in 2008.

Free to Play UK launches at a unique moment for play.  Rather than simply responding to renewed policy interest, the programme aims to demonstrate what long-term investment in child-directed play can achieve and help inform the next generation of policy and practice across the UK.

We argue endlessly about what childhood online should look like, and hardly ever about what we give children instead.  Good, free, local outdoor play and the ability for kids to move around freely and safely to find, create and experience it, is a big part of the answer.

Culture shift

We're not funding one-off projects or kit, and we’re not running a traditional grant programme.  We’ve carefully developed an approach over the last 12 months which channels best practice, advice, and expertise and a place-based model that’s been working well in our Care Leavers Programme.  In the coming months we'll test it more robustly with the sector before finalising the plan.  Years of building collaborations have taught me to get the design right with people who know the landscape, even where that takes more time.

We want to shift attitudes for the long term – by understanding first what makes every day play possible in a place, and what the barriers are, and by supporting and growing local leadership.  Community foundations are well placed for that: local, trusted and able to pull councils, businesses and schools together long after a grant ends.  Each community foundation will shape a programme that fits its own context – using a mixture of convening, commissioning and grants to build momentum holistically.

To support this attitudinal work, it's a collaborative programme by design.  As well as learning alongside our Canadian colleagues, Play England will support the programme as England's national charity for play, helping to connect local delivery with wider policy, practice, evidence and sector leadership as the programme develops.  We’ll be guided by Helen Dodd’s work at the University of Exeter, and the wider academic field, to embed learning live, in a test and learn approach.  Save the Children will help us with a children’s rights and participation approach.

An invitation

We're not opening the programme yet.  We're saying we're building it, that funding is committed and that we want to grow it, because the need is far bigger than any one funder can meet.

Next on our agenda is to bring the 20 places together, alongside the 22 Canadian places, and alongside the sector, and run a three-month learning programme, so that when we open in springtime next year, we know what we're trying to shift and what good looks like.

So, take this as an invitation.  If you're a funder who cares about children, communities or the places they grow up in, I'd love to talk.  You can find out more about Free to Play UK, and how to join us, on the Funders Collaborative Hub.

In the meantime, here's to a summer of play, here, there and everywhere.