Adrian Voce - Play England

ePolitix.com speaks to Adrian Voce, director of Play England, about Playday 2008

Question: What is Playday 2008?

Adrian Voce: Playday is the annual celebration of children's right to play, held across the UK on the first Wednesday in August every year since 1987. This year's Playday is on Wednesday August 6. On Playday and throughout the summer of 2008, thousands of children, young people and communities will get out and play at hundreds of locally organised events across the UK.

Question: This year's theme is Give us a go! What is the relevance of the theme to children’s play?

Adrian Voce: Give us a go! calls for children to be allowed challenging and adventurous play opportunities and aims to shake off the 'cotton wool' culture that can limit children's play.

Question: What are the major barriers to children’s play? How do you hope to change people’s attitudes towards risk and play and what role should the government have?

Adrian Voce: A disproportionate concern with health and safety regulations in children's play provision is a major barrier. The parents and carers' anxieties are also a major factor. But we're not blaming parents, some of these anxieties are well founded; others, like the general concern that children will come to serious harm from adventurous play opportunities, are less so.

We want to persuade people that children need to be allowed degrees of freedom when they play and offer play areas where they can encounter and negotiate risks for themselves.

A good adventure playground, for example, will give children all kinds of opportunities to have fun by stretching and challenging themselves as they grow up, in an environment that has been intelligently risk assessed to balance risk with benefits to children. This testing of their limits is a crucial part of children's development, but, more importantly, is an essential part of enjoying childhood.

The government has taken great strides over the last year: making funding available for local councils to do more for play - including new, staffed adventure playgrounds - but also looking at the role of planners in removing some of the barriers and creating public space that is more child friendly. We welcomed these measures and now want local authorities to respond positively to the challenge.

Question: Has the campaign impacted on local community development and community cohesion? How significantly has the campaign impacted on local provision of services for children?

Adrian Voce: The Playday campaign, first and foremost, supports local Playday organisers to promote play in their local area, and this year we have a record 500 individual Playday events registered around the country. The campaign has also, unquestionably, helped to promote the importance of children's play in the media and with politicians by making the case for the new funding and the policy measures that the government announced in December and the national play strategy that was launched in April. This should certainly lead to a growth in staffed play provision as part of integrated children's services.

The development of unstaffed play areas, if done intelligently, should also promote community cohesion insofar as it has been shown that good, local play areas and child-friendly public space helps to bring the whole community together and to break down social and cultural barriers.

Question: The revised national play strategy is due to be launched in the autumn, what do you hope to see in the strategy?

Adrian Voce: The Fair Play consultation document contained much that we could warmly welcome and so we'd like to see a restatement of the main commitments: a programme of building new staffed adventure playgrounds where they are most needed; raising the bar for unstaffed public play space and fixed equipment playgrounds; reforming the planning system and putting more responsibility on the whole authority for children's environmental well-being, including a bigger push for pedestrianised residential areas, home zones and 20mph limits; a play indicator in the national indicator set for local authority performance; professionalising the play workforce; cross-professional training in play principles for all those responsible for public space; and building the capacity of the voluntary and community play sector.

We'd also like to see:

• Adequate revenue funding to local authorities, to support the long-term maintenance of sites and local infrastructure and the level of qualified supervision that, in many areas, will be crucial to making provision both fully accessible and fun.
• Government guidance on play in schools and extended schools, underpinned by a statutory requirement for all new-build and refurbishment projects (for example, Building Schools for the Future and the Primary Capital Programme) to include minimum standards for play space and for a minimum allocation of playtime as part of the school. This guidance should also cover opening up school grounds for local children's play. Where necessary, the regulatory framework should be revised to allow this to become the norm.
• A stronger steer to Ofsted - and training for its inspectors - on the enjoyment outcome in the 2004 Children Act and the importance of free play provision delivered by registered settings. There also needs to be urgent discussions with Ofsted about the implications of the Early Years Foundation settings for staffed play provision that includes younger children.