Policy for Play

The Flourish Summit, organised by the Save Childhood Movement in London last weekend, presented an impressive array of writers, academics, researchers and practitioners, all talking about what the latest research tells us of the state of modern childhood, and how we should aim to improve it. Adrian Voce noticed a common theme…

There were psychologists and neurologists, psychiatrists and teachers, philosophers and kings (I made the last one up, but I did spot a Baroness!) With such a diverse collection of eminent thinkers speaking to such a broad topic, one might expect a wide range of different analyses and solutions. Yet there was a surprising degree of convergence around one major issue. And the word that came up over and over again was play. “Children aren’t getting enough of it and this is a serious problem”, was the almost universal theme throughout the two-day event.

Where next for play policy?

The causes were slightly more controversial. The ubiquitous presence of electronic screens in children’s lives came in for serious condemnation from some, less from others. Poor planning, unfettered traffic, inequality, paranoid parenting and rapacious marketing all came in for their share of blame for the range of poor outcomes for Britain’s children. But over and over again the solutions were the same. After basic loving care and boundaries, what children from the earliest age need most is play, play and more (outdoor) play.

Support for street play

In spite of this, there were, sadly, no play academics as such on the programme. Tim Gill, once of the Children’s Play Council, spoke of the recent gains in rolling back an oppressively risk averse culture, especially in playground design, while Cath Prisk of Play England had some good news about government funding to support street play. But against these modest advances the repeated, often heartfelt calls from educationists and others for children to be given more time and more space for free, outdoor play – in and out of school and nursery – was the most striking thing about the event.

Many speakers roundly criticised education policy – not just the current government’s but longer-term trends in general, especially for the early years. This was perhaps unsurprising given the links that this movement has with the Open Eye campaign. Dr. Richard House, of the University of Winchester, an Open Eye founder, only half-jokingly called for a campaign of ‘principled non-compliance’ in the face of a government that has dismissed the importance of free play, saying ‘there is revolution in the air’. Others echoed the cry.

Even Baroness Greenfield, the Oxford Professor who has controversially linked excessive screen-time to ADHD and even autism, effectively called for a national play strategy saying, “it is not enough to try and restrict access to screens: we must create a more attractive alternative”. Now where have I heard that before?

Play Strategy

The Flourish Summit was like 2007 revisited. It was then that a similar list of the great and good from academia, politics and literature wrote to the Daily Telegraph demanding the government to act to protect shrinking childhoods and ‘let our children play’. The wave of support for action on play that swelled up around that time enabled us to amplify our case for a serious national play policy in England and for those campaigning for it to extend beyond the play movement. This gave us the extra momentum that took us all the way to the Play Strategy we had been campaigning for for nearly a decade and which, if it hadn’t been for the change of government, would now be into its sixth year.

The Play Strategy set out over twelve years to transform our public realm, making all neighbourhoods into child-friendly places, perceived to be safe by parents, seen as fit for play by children; and building a new generation of play areas and adventure playgrounds designed for children rather than the maintenance budget or the health and safety officer. These are just the kinds of response now being called for with even greater urgency by those best qualified to know the consequences of not acting.

Many other, non-governmental agencies have taken up the challenge since the plug was pulled. We heard yesterday from the National Trust, for example, whose Wild Network and Project Wild Thing are turning the flair of streetwise marketing ‘creatives’ to the task of selling the outdoors to children. Playing Out, conversely, is a grass roots parents’ movement aiming to help others to arrange regular play days in their own streets by the simple means of closing them off to traffic, which is not as easy as it sounds. Play England’s new Health funding will deservedly see resources going into helping this inspiring project to grow.

Making the case – again

There are many more examples. Providing for children’s play is a self-evident need for any community and the resourceful ones will always find a way to do it, whilst intelligent organisations like the NT will see their responsibility for it too. But the need for space – accessible, everyday, ideally natural space – for all children to play is so universal and so acute that only the government can really command the resources and marshal the sectors that need to respond sufficiently to have the impact that is needed. This government may not be interested in a play strategy, even of a different hue – certainly not one led by what used to be the Department for Children and is now very much the Department for Education – but the case for one is stronger than ever; and we are only two years away from an election.

The play movement, especially the playwork sector, which is facing decimation as the impact of austerity cuts swathes through local play services, is asking itself at the moment, “where do we go next, what do we need to do to protect play provision, to fight for playwork?”

The answer, if we believe space for play is a societal responsibility, must always be in policy. It’s way past time for the case to be made for a new Play Strategy.

Adrian Voce

The Save Childhood Movement is launching the first National Children’s Day on 15th May 

www.nationalchildrensdaysdayuk.com 

Thatcherism diminishes the role of the state in supporting communities where children can play

Within Thatcher’s legacy of a help-yourself culture with ”no such thing as society”, there is little room for play policy. This aspect of Thatcherism is alive and well in today’s government and speaking out, writes Adrian Voce, is the only rational response.

The death of Baroness Thatcher has given rise to more reflection, analysis and comment than that of any British politician since Churchill.  A major figure who changed the history of our country – some have called her the greatest peacetime Prime Minister since Gladstone – she was also one of the most divisive, and her capacity to polarise opinion is undiminished. For every tribute, there has been an indictment. She took no prisoners: you were either for or against her. To the Murdoch empire, she was a “symbol of liberty and strength”, to the Guardian “her legacy is public division, private selfishness and a culture of greed”.

I wrote here a couple of weeks ago about the need for our policy positions – the making of our case for play provision and playable space – to be non-aligned to any broad political ideology. Yet, within the UK children’s play movement there is a seemingly unquestioned consensus that Thatcher’s influence was, and is toxic. Many are openly celebrating her demise.  The New Labour years of Blair and Brown do not command a consensus of endorsement from play campaigners by any means, but Thatcherism is almost universally regarded as the antithesis of what we stand for.

Why is this so? What is it about wanting to provide for children’s right to play that so unequivocally sets us against the free-market economics and right wing politics of Thatcher’s conservatism?

More Ball Games?

Many aspects of the play agenda – greater freedom for children, a less risk-averse approach to provision and a return to more traditional “free-range” childhoods – are, at least superficially, highly sympathetic to modern British conservatism.  And so it was not just the Labour government that adopted play as a serious new policy area in the noughties. In 2007-8 – at the same time that the idea of a national play strategy was taking hold with a newly restructured Department for Children under Ed Balls – as director of Play England I was not only advising Balls’ team but also that of David Willets, the shadow minister who was drafting his party’s new child policy review. The resultant More Ball Games (which also had Tim Gill as an advisor) contained much that the play sector could welcome.

On closer examination, however, the document is revealed as opportunistic, cynical even. Keen to be seen to respond to the concerns about “shrinking childhoods” that had been part of the zeitgeist for a couple of years – from front page headlines in the Sun to academic letters to the Telegraph – the Tories, ahead of the emerging play policy being developed by Balls, were clearly aiming to steal the government’s thunder.

By calling for a return to traditional, “three-dimensional” (as opposed to screen-based) play, “everyday adventures” and “free-range childhoods”, they were tapping into growing concerns about the sedentary, indoor lives that were coming to be seen as a big factor in the childhood obesity epidemic, and much else besides. They also knew this would play well to their heartlands, resonating with the nostalgic idylls of middle England where children play conkers in leafy gardens, scrape their knees climbing trees and play out until dusk with not a Health and Safety regulation in sight.

In fact, More Ball Games proposed nothing material other than a review of Health and Safety law and a sideswipe at European standards for fixed equipment. If you believed the rhetoric, these favourite Tory whipping boys – regulation and Europe – were the real culprits, not the traffic, crime, commercial domination of planning or lack of investment in community play provision that the evidence suggested. When challenged at its launch about what more a Conservative Government would do about “battery-reared” children David Cameron let slip his party’s true position: this was not really the territory for central government. He would, instead, “free up” parents and local areas to respond in their own way.

Although Cameron, at that stage, fell short of describing play policy as symptomatic of the “nanny state” (he could hardly do anything else at the launch of what was the closest his party got to one), the message was clear. Responding to barriers to children’s play was part of the “big government” that he would be rolling back. And so it proved.

“Nanny State”

This laissez-faire strain of conservative thinking has always been there but had been held in check by the more patriarchal, One Nation Tories until the Thatcher revolution. It was the Iron Lady and her team who, if they did not coin it, certainly popularized the term “nanny state” as the antithesis of the unshackled free market economy in which there was “no such thing as society” (with the implication that there was scant need for much social policy). Dissenters were known as “wets” and did not last long in her government.

Contrast this with the Labour Government thinking that led eventually to the Play Strategy. Writing for the left-of centre think-tank, Compass in 2007, David Lammy, who as a culture minister had children’s play in his portfolio, was clear about “the limits of the market” in supporting children and families. Highlighting the UK’s poor showing (bottom) in that year’s UNICEF  child-wellbeing table of wealthy nations, he compared Britain to Holland (top), where the Home Zone concept was created and “free range” children were the norm. “We need to embed the concept of child friendly planning … within our own policies for the built environment and open spaces”, he said. “Children should be central to spatial planning principles and playable landscapes, not just the beneficiaries of the occasional playground”.

Compared to the similar rhetoric about conkers and climbing trees, here was the real difference between the main parties. Labour, recognising that even the children of affluent families are not independent players in the market but “need to have a real stake in the common spaces of their neighbourhoods”, would need the power of the state to calm the traffic, redesign public spaces and police the low level crime that was keeping children indoors. This thinking led quite logically to an ambitious ten-year strategy to create a playable, child-friendly public realm across England. The Conservative thinking, just as inevitably, led to the underwhelming policy breakthrough of a “High Level Statement” by the Health and Safety Executive about the value of risk-benefit assessments. Oh, and an abandonment of the Play Strategy and an end to ring-fenced funding for new provision.

Inequality

This week, free play advocates shed no tears for Margaret Thatcher: because her government’s policies massively increased the economic inequality that still sees so many children growing up in poverty and play deprivation; because it was her regime that introduced market forces into public services, brining to an end the culture of local authority grants on which so many adventure playgrounds and other community play projects had depended; and because her administration gave birth to the childcare industry which would subvert so much play provision to the needs of the economy.

More instinctively though, play advocates loathed and dreaded Thatcher because the notion of community – of “it takes a village to raise a child” – was not just alien to her: she was contemptuous of it. For most of us, a fighting response was the only civilized one.

Why this all matters more than 20 years after her departure from government, is that Thatcher may have gone but her legacy is alive and well. The “Big Society” disguise for Cameron and Osborne’s true mission to “roll back the frontiers of the state”, like the good Thatcherites they are, has long since been thrown. A national children’s play policy of any substance has no hope with a government as keen to devolve, deregulate and dismantle as this one. The Lib Dems would have us believe they are a counterbalancing force, but as an illustration of how effectively, just ask what happened to the Task Force that Nick Clegg announced in 2010 “to find new solutions … to the need for spaces where children can play”, of which nothing has been heard since.

Common decency should give us pause – dancing on graves is not for us – but speaking out clearly against what Margaret Thatcher stood for, at a time when she is being lionised by her successors and canonised by the right wing press, is as important as ever.

Adrian Voce

Last year Adrian Voce worked with Islington Play Association on its project to secure land for adventure playgrounds in the inner London borough. Here, he describes the work and its outcome – and why finding such a solution to this issue has never been more important.

It is not just benefit recipients for whom 1 April dawned this year like the cruelest of jokes. As the Conservative-led coalition government ushers in a new era of unprecedented reductions in the role and capacity of the state to help those in need – a chilling landmark which many see as the end of the Welfare State as we know it – many millions of people who use or work in public or voluntary sector services are deeply anxious about what the future holds.

With more than 50 per cent of local authorities making cuts to, or outsourcing, children’s and youth services, following on from the ending of ring-fenced government funding for play in 2010, there is no doubt that the sector is suffering. Although a clear national picture is hard to find it is clear that play services and play spaces are taking a bigger hit than most.

In trying to resist these cuts most of the focus has naturally tended to fall on funding. It is for economic reasons that services are being closed and playgrounds torn down, with councils no longer believing they have the revenue to maintain them. Alternative business models, new funding sources and the potential of social enterprise schemes to help keep play projects open are the order of the day. Having enjoyed all too few days in the sun before the new government tore up the play strategy – and our hopes of a sustained period of growth with it – the sector now has to find new ways to fund itself.

But biting cuts to local authority budgets are not the only effect of the coalition government’s mission to shrink the role of the state that will impact on play provision. Indeed one new policy change effective from 1 April has a potentially longer-term and even more seriously harmful effect on the nation’s children than the funding drought (which will, we have to hope, ultimately come to an end).

“This change is forever”

Simon Jenkins has written in the Guardian about the new National Planning Policy Framework, the slim-line document published in March 2012, but effective from this week, designed to free up the planning system in favour of “sustainable development”. Replacing a comprehensive range (over 1000 pages) of planning policy statements and guidance with a mere 50, Jenkins believes that the document, originally intended to simplify and clarify an overcomplicated and opaque system, was greatly influenced by “the developer lobby hijacking an important but emotive policy on housing” and that “its purpose is (now) brutally simple: to release for potential building the 60% of England’s land area that is unprotected countryside”.  Once implemented, he warns,  “this change is forever”.

Whilst the effect of this drastic new approach may be most visibly on the countryside, the massive easing up of planning regulations in favour of development also makes more vulnerable those pockets of land in towns and cities which may currently be in community use. Commonly without proper deeds of title or secure long-term-term leases, community projects like adventure playgrounds are therefore not only at risk from the squeeze on local authority revenue budgets, but from newly liberated developers, who will see easy pickings in many local authorities’ community land portfolios, just as the councils themselves will be under pressure to realise their assets. Add to the mix the fact that many have yet to produce the local plans required of them under the Localism Bill and we are looking at a perfect storm for community play. Adventure playgrounds, because they mostly occupy sizeable inner city sites, are particularly at risk.

Islington Play Association (IPA), in the north inner-London borough with the least open space – and the most adventure playgrounds – of any local authority area in the country, has found a solution.

Deed of Dedication

In June 2012 the local charity, then celebrating 40 years of supporting community play provision, especially the voluntary managed adventure playgrounds, in the borough, announced that the council had adopted a new legal instrument known as a Deed of Dedication for each of Islington’s 12 adventure playgrounds. Appended to the land title documents and therefore applicable to all leasehold agreements, the deed defines a restricted – or “dedicated” – use for the land, in this case children’s free adventure play, and prevents any other use being made of it “in perpetuity”, without the consent of all parties.

Islington children’s adventure playgrounds are now legally safeguarded “in perpetuity”. Photo: IPA

The dedication is safeguarded by assigning its custody to a third party – in this case Fields in Trust (formerly the National Playing Fields Association), whose written consent is required before the land can be used for any other purpose. Thus, whatever arrangements may evolve (or dissolve) between the landholder (the council) and the leaseholder (the service provider), the adventure playgrounds must remain as such. Fields in Trust has no interest in the title other than safeguarding the dedicated use. As a charity of over 100 years standing, the playgrounds are therefore in safe hands.

IPA was keenly aware of the growing threat to the treasured adventure playgrounds from the dire economic circumstances and the pressure on land in such a crowded and upwardly mobile part of inner London. With funding from the City Bridge Trust, it had researched the issue for two years – first looking at the feasibility of the council being persuaded to invoke community asset transfer powers to move the land into a bespoke community land trust, but eventually settling for this less cumbersome solution.

One immediate consequence was that IPA was left free to bid for, and win a new service provider contract for the voluntary managed playgrounds, as it announced in February. Becoming a Play Land Trust would have meant it taking on landlord status for the playground sites, thus potentially ruling it out of also becoming the service provider. With the council determined to find a single provider, compared to the several small and unsustainable voluntary management committees that were in place, this itself was a good result: the voluntary organisation with the best experience of, and closest ties to the adventure playgrounds is now running them.

Desirable assets

The longer-term consequence is even more important. Because Islington’s adventure playgrounds no longer occupy prime real estate in one of the most desirable parts of the capital – the assets being now effectively devalued by the highly restrictive deeds – they are doubly protected for play for the foreseeable future. This should make long-term leases much easier to negotiate and ambitious fundraising plans, capital grants or social enterprise business models more achievable: an elegant and very timely outcome, just as the coalition government’s love of burning “red-tape” would otherwise have given the green-light to businesses for whom children’s right to play is an inconvenient irrelevance.

Adrian Voce

A controversy over “child-friendly” planning in Europe is an opportunity to review our ethical framework for play advocacy, argues Adrian Voce

A recent on-line debate around the child-friendly city movement reminded me of a, partly but not entirely, rhetorical question a colleague of mine recently posed: “to be a play advocate, do you also have to be a socialist?”

My immediate answer was “no, but…”

If advocacy for children’s play provision is accompanied by a broader set of political aims, there is a danger that the primary purpose is diluted or that an important part of the intended audience may stop listening[1]. Practically, too, single-issue pressure groups attract supporters and staff from a broad political spectrum. Overt political bias may alienate or discriminate against those who hold different views or allegiances. And, of course, if the structure for the advocacy work is a charity, then overt political campaigning is not allowed.

Savage cuts

But…these are tactical or practical reasons that don’t really answer the fundamental question (which arose, of course, in the face of the savage cuts being faced by many play services as the Coalition government rolls back whole swathes of the public sector in the name of deficit reduction). Although posed in simple terms, the question is a complex one: when does the professional become political? Can an ethical basis for our movement stand separately from the big political choices? Can we campaign for greater investment in a type of public provision without also coming out for the kind of economy and the kind of government we want?

As individuals, these questions are not hard. We answer them at least every time we vote. But in the professional arena they are not so easy. Many of us work for – or with – the arms of whichever government or local government happens to be in power. Overt political positions for the roles we play here are simply not on. And yet, as we try to develop strategies to cope with the effects of policy decisions that are damaging to so much of what we have worked for, the questions are nevertheless unavoidable.

A consideration of the Rotterdam controversy provides a different context for these questions and, being further removed from our own challenges, may allow the objectivity we need to find some answers.

Is Rotterdam’s child-friendly city policy ethical?

People familiar with the child-friendly city movement will know that Holland’s second city, host of the 2008 international Child in the City conference, is celebrated for its approach and its achievements in establishing a planning and urban renewal strategy that has (apparently) produced some genuinely playable, child-friendly spaces, integrated within the public realm rather than fenced off in a corner of the park like so many European playgrounds.

Tim Gill, along with many others, has spoken glowingly about Rotterdam, highlighting these developments as examples of what is possible, even in big, crowded cities, when children’s needs and perspectives are properly considered in spatial development and planning policies at a strategic level.

Yet Tim recently featured the city in a different light. A circular about his latest Rethinking Childhood blog asked, rhetorically, if we weren’t in fact now seeing, “the dark side of Rotterdam’s child-friendly city programme?”. The cause for him rethinking, not childhood on this occasion, but child-friendly cities, was a paper by Marguerite van den Berg of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, which appeared in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

Trojan Horse?

Entitled City Children and Genderfied Neighbourhoods: The New Generation as Urban Regeneration Strategy, the paper looks at Rotterdam’s urban renewal process and suggests that one of Holland’s poorest cities has essentially used the child-friendly city approach as a Trojan Horse for a gentrification programme that is driving out poor families from traditional working class areas.

A feminist critique is central to Van den Berg’s thesis (as the paper’s title indicates). Women’s voices, with their natural empathy for children’s rights, she suggests, have been appropriated to the programme in order to make it seem more benign. In fact, she argues, a policy of replacing existing urban dwellings with new, larger and more expensive ‘family-friendly homes’ is central to the project and this is a deliberate attempt to introduce more middle class families into the inner city residential areas at the expense of poorer families who cannot afford the new dwellings. Her analysis is that that the municipality “appears to be deliberately and actively marginalising poor families, in the pursuit of an image and ambience that will appeal to more affluent and desirable residents” (Part of this marginalization is the framing of children and young people from “troubled”, working class families as villains of the peace, a source of anti-social behavior and criminality. Sound familiar?)

Presenting the gentrification programme as a policy to create a more child-friendly city, is thus, in Van den Berg’s view, a disingenuous cover for a more cynical political objective: stimulating economic growth on the back of displacing the very children and young people who most need to benefit from it - and destroying traditional working class communities in the process.

Citing a lack of local knowledge, Tim Gill has remained on the fence in the debate that this paper has provoked (“given my distance…it would be foolish for me to pass final judgment here”) although he is keen to hear what others think, challenging, as it does, some of the assumptions we may have made about “playable public space”. I have considerably less experience of urban renewal in the Dutch inner cities than Tim and so also claim ignorance as to the merits or otherwise of the Rotterdam policy. But it does cause me to think about the political dimensions of play advocacy. Two different presentations at the recent Playwork conference in Eastbourne are useful here.

Playwork ethics

In “the only way is Ethics” Wendy Russell suggested that a proper code of practice – one essential element in the establishment of playwork as a mature profession – would require a clear and robust ethical framework. This begged the question for me: where does one turn to find the moral basis for an ethical code? Morals are not absolute. Different faiths and cultures may take a different moral and therefore ethical standpoint on a range of the same issues. How then to create a framework that respects individual ethics and yet commands the universal recognition throughout the profession that would be fundamental to its workability? These are questions which have no doubt been debated and to a great extent resolved within more established professions. Wendy brings her own unique – ludocentric as well as academic – rigour to the issue (it is the subject of her PhD) in a way that should serve the profession well for years to come.

Much of the emerging ethical framework will deal with the playworker’s response to individual or groups of children. Questions of integrity, confidentiality, regulatory against personal responsibility, when to intervene and when not to, honouring the play process whilst safeguarding appropriate boundaries: these are issues where the playworker may find an ethical code helpful in addressing daily dilemmas in the play space.

But the playwork principles apply beyond the play space. Indeed, “the prime focus and essence of playwork is to support and facilitate the play process, and this should inform the development of play policy, strategy, training and education”. The practitioner’s role is not limited to face-to-face work, or even its planning, but is also to “advocate for play when engaging with adult led agendas”. Thus, our ethical framework must inform not just our playwork but how we engage with the policy, planning and funding arenas that will determine or effect the provision and opportunities that children are to be afforded.

This brings us back, slightly circuitously, to the politics question. Play policy cannot be developed in a vacuum, but will, wherever it takes hold, be part of a broader agenda that is inevitably determined by a political ideology or programme. What is the ethical framework that will allow us to most effectively engage, as play advocates, with this political process? We can be less equivocal now, I hope, that the answer cannot be Socialism (whose prime focus and purpose is certainly not the play process!) any more than it can be Capitalism, nep-Liberalism, Marxism or any other political ideology. This does not mean to say that we may not find more common ground – and therefore more opportunity for play policy development – within some parts of the political spectrum than others. But we must start from a different place.

Here, another presentation at the Playwork conference provided a timely reminder of not just the right ethical framework for play advocacy, but one that has the status of International Law. I refer, of course, to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).

The right of all children to play

Gerison Lansdowne gave Eastbourne delegates a preview of the General Comment on Article 31 of the UNCRC, which explicates in more detail than ever before what steps member states should be taking to ensure children’s right to play under the Convention. It is clear that governments should promote and educate their adult populations in the value and importance of play; legislate and fund sufficient play provision and playable space; and protect the access and inclusivity of this provision and this space for all their children with particular attention to those for whom economic, physical or cultural barriers are greatest. Also underlined by the general comment is the important principle that all articles within the Convention must be mutually enabling. (My fuller look at the new general comment can be found here).

So it is that questions about Rotterdam’s possible hidden agenda in creating a child-friendly city can be addressed with a clear eye. Play advocacy, taking its ethical lead from the UNCRC, would not endorse an approach that saw the creation of beautiful play areas and child-friendly streetscapes if the policy that enabled them also made them exclusive to middle class children, or caused hardship to poorer families.

It is worth repeating that the Rotterdam controversy is one that I have no particular perspective on, but the principle is clear. And closer to home article 31 of the UNCRC, as now expanded upon, should allow us to say, without fear or favour, that cutting play services, with no evidence that they are more than sufficient, is an abuse of children’s rights and a breach of international law.

That’s not socialism. It’s ethical playwork.

Adrian Voce

The imminent publication of a General Comment on Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child may not impress a government blinkered in its vision of a smaller state, but for the play movement it should inform a longer term campaign, argues Adrian Voce.

As we await publication of the General Comment on Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, whose adoption was announced by the UN on 1 February (and which was previewed at the National Playwork Conference earlier this month) there is a temptation to think that the delay is indicative of the low priority afforded to children’s right to play even by the very organisation which, we are given to understand, is now promoting its importance. The play movement is accustomed to fine platitudes preceding only lightweight or negligible policy announcements.

However, in this case, such suspicions are probably unjustified. Three other General Comments were adopted by the same session of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and we must assume, therefore, that the slow move to reveal what has actually been agreed is a result of bureaucratic inertia rather than anything more cynical. Anyone who has tried to even navigate the UN’s various websites, let alone steer a detailed policy statement through its byzantine committee structure, will be aware how opaque this “government of governments” can be.

Achievement

In this light, the delay in publication only serves to highlight the achievement of the international play movement represented by IPA in reaching this point. But the interregnum also provides us with an opportunity to say how we might expect our own governments to respond to what will, after all, be an authoritative interpretation of how member states should be recognising, fulfilling and protecting the child’s right to play according to international law.

Of course, what governments should do and what we can realistically expect them to do are very different. The right to play was widely overlooked  – or at best arrived at very late – even when we had an expansive policy framework that looked beyond statutory services to universal outcomes for children. In England, certainly, an administration committed to a smaller role for the state and with an economic argument for reducing it in unprecedentedly large swathes, will not be swayed in the least by what it will regard as an over-prescriptive, theoretical wish-list. Indeed, it will be surprising if the coalition government responds at all.

One reason for this is that, since Secretary of State, Michael Gove literally tore up Every Child Matters (removing the symbolic rainbow logo on his first day in office) and cut the former Department for Children, Schools and Families back to what he sees as its core purpose of reforming schools, there has been no one in this government with play in their portfolio. Quite simply, they have nothing to say about it because they don’t believe it is their responsibility.

Not government’s responsibility?

Prime Minister, David Cameron said as much when, as leader of the opposition, he launched his party’s child policy review, More Ball Games, in 2008, and, in spite of his fine words about children needing “everyday adventures”, let slip that this was a challenge for local, not central government. The subsequent financial crash and towering national debt it produced, only consolidated the Conservatives’ view that a national Play Strategy is the last thing the country can afford. In spite of Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg’s fine speech  in 2010 about a ministerial task force to look at the issue, it was duly one of the first to follow the rainbow into the shredder labeled “deficit reduction”.

Will the UN’s General Comment about children’s right to play help to put the play campaign in England back on track?

But just because the government of the day has turned a deaf ear, doesn’t mean the policy case for play isn’t worth making. Once the general comment is published we must seize upon it. The barrenness of the current landscape and its growing impact on local provision heightens the need for strong, clear advocacy for an alternative approach, based on international law. If this seems unrealistic, we need look no further than Wales to see that it is not.

The sufficiency duty

Whilst  local councils in Wales grapple with the practical implications of their new statutory duty to provide a “sufficiency of play opportunities“,  services in England are being decimated, play spaces closed down, iconic playgrounds demolished. The relegation of play from being flavour of the month to being most obvious candidate for cuts has been savage and has affected all levels of the sector. At times like this resistance is difficult. Many people have been made redundant, others are keeping their heads down, but the movement must regroup, restate its arguments and once again set out the policy case for children’s play provision to be an essential part of public services and the public realm.

The current  UK government may not be interested, but, for play advocates, the General Comment on article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights should be exactly what we need to give our arguments substance and authority – making the case for play’s inclusion in the manifesto of the next one.

Adrian Voce

The National Playwork Conference in Eastbourne this week heard from Gerison Lansdown, the person commissioned to draft the General Comment on Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Adrian Voce was all ears.

The General Comment on Article 31 (about the child’s right to play) of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) was expected to be published this week by the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights.

It will probably not cause many ripples in Whitehall. Nor is it likely to fire up a headline debate, even in child policy circles. Referred to by the UN itself as children’s “forgotten right”, playing is such a natural, commonplace thing, and so out of the sight and mind of the adult world, that society at large scarcely notices when it is being denied or abused. A slightly obscure, quasi-legal analysis of an international convention with no binding measures or means of accountability will not change that.

And yet, if the inclusion of the right to play within the UNCRC itself was a game-changer for the children’s play movement, leading eventually – as it surely did – to serious policy commitments by the governments of England, Wales and many more, then this General Comment must be seized upon by play advocates as a vital new basis for applying pressure on our elected representatives to take this responsibility seriously and to look again at where play provision sits within their plans for children.

Earlier this week, Gerison Lansdown, the children’s rights advocate who drafted the General Comment with the support of the International Association for the Child’s Right to Play (IPA), gave the national Playwork Conference in Eastbourne a sneak preview.

Gerison began by emphasizing that the purpose of General Comments (there have been 13 to date), is to set out what governments are required to do to implement the different parts of the convention they have signed, or, in her words, “to provide guidance on the measures necessary to ensure its implementation for all children without discrimination and on the basis of equality of opportunity”.

Government action on play

Assuming Gerrison’s text makes it through the committee structure of the UN, the General Comment will therefore set out a policy template – the international equivalent of statutory guidance if you like – for concerted and strategic government action on play.

The first thing it will say is that policy makers have seriously under-estimated the importance of play in children’s lives and its role in their future life-chances. It will acknowledge the potential tensions between planned, organised play provision, and the need for children’s freedom to play without structure, throughout their environment.

Bravely (and possibly controversially for a treatise on a human right), it will also tackle the perennial debate about striking the balance between pragmatism and principle. Gerison spoke of the need to make policy that recognises and responds to play’s intrinsic value at the same time as positioning such policy to address society’s abiding concern’s for children’s health, safety, development and education. Or, in her words “to enhance understanding of the importance of Article 31 for children’s development and well-being, and for the realisation of other rights in the Convention” – as well as play’s importance within its own right.

Necessarily, the General Comment will seek to define what the UN means by play: an “essential component of child development” embodying “fun, uncertainty, challenge, flexibility”. Importantly it will reiterate that play is “behaviour, activity, or processes initiated, controlled and structured by children themselves …”, “non-compulsory, driven by intrinsic motivation … undertaken for its own sake”.

Crucially for the playwork sector the General Comment will talk about “the necessary level of adult oversight and engagement”, the need for “opportunities for risk-taking and challenge” as well as the obligation on states to make “access to reasonable opportunities to inhabit public spaces without harassment”.

Some will be disappointed that the General Comment, will not, it seems, more fully embrace the proposition put forward in IPA’s working paper on Children’s Right to Play – part of the international play community’s attempt to stimulate a re-examination, not just of how states parties should implement the article, but where the article and therefore play itself should sit within the concept of universal rights for children. This concluded that the right to play should be seen as “an integral component, under­pinning the four principles of the CRC (non-discrimination, survival and development, the best interests of the child, and participation)”, rather than, as is too commonly the case now, a lesser adjunct to the right to be educated.

Supporting the conditions where play can take place

Children’s play, this argument goes, tends to be viewed through the policy prism of what services or interventions children should be entitled to, equating it with adult culture or leisure, or something that is only worthwhile to the extent that it enhances children’s education. Many play advocates rail against this. Lester and Russell’s paper posits that a proper appreciation of play’s central role in children’s lives “does not necessarily mean providing specific services; it means avoiding the temptation to dismiss play as frivolous, restrict it through fear for and of children, or control and appropriate it for more instrumental purposes. The principle is to uphold article 31 … through support­ing the conditions where play can take place”.

It was perhaps hoping for too much to expect something that might imply a redrafting of the Charter itself, but it does seem that the General Comment will at least draw clear links between the right to play and the right to participate. Some play campaigners have long proposed that the right to play is much more akin to the wider human right to freedom of movement, association and expression than to any specific type of service, education or otherwise, and the General Comment may well further that argument.

Most usefully, it will set out some unambiguous types of action for national governments, grouped under three broad obligations: to respect the right to play; to fulfill the right to play; and to protect the right to play.

Governments, according to the UN, are bound by the Convention on the Rights of the Child to educate parents and more generally raise awareness and promote respect for children’s freedom to play.

Legislation and funding

But perhaps the most important part of the document will say that Governments should enact appropriate legislation, undertake the necessary planning and allocate adequate budgets to provide for play for all children. In this latter regard it will highlight the disproportionate use of public funding for adult culture, sport and leisure compared to children’s play and call for this to change. Legislation and funding should be underpinned, the General Comment will say, with relevant data collection and research to inform the planning process that should be driven by cross-departmental collaboration and partnerships, populated by a properly skilled workforce.

Under the duty to protect the right to play, some advocates will feel that the General Comment strays too far into safeguarding territory, arguing that protecting the right to play should be about securing land, defending services and protecting children’s freedoms more than children’s safety per se; not because this isn’t important but because safeguarding has its own champions and because children’s safety has already been a major theme of at least three previous General Comments.

Achieving a wider consensus on the need to not overprotect children at the expense of their need to take risks and have adventures has been one of the successes of the UK play movement in recent years, but in a world where children are still commonly prey to abuse (however much moral panics may distort the reality), it is inevitable that any major treatise will draw attention to children’s vulnerability and society’s first duty to keep them free from harm. This should not detract from what, in the round, should be seen as a reprimand to governments everywhere that have treated play provision and playable space as a dispensable luxury, if they have thought much about it at all.

The United Nations, we can now feel sure, will make no bones about its position that this is simply not good enough: that children’s right to play is as important as any other; that governments have a legal duty to provide for it; and that this provision should be universal, substantial and long-term.

Tsunami of cuts

The tsunami of cuts to public services that followed the political earthquake of 2010 and is still gathering force has perhaps made us a little bit compliant with the new realities. Some of us have been browbeaten into accepting that the austere economic climate we are in means it is only reasonable that play policy and play provision is sacrificed. But it is one thing to do what we need to survive; and quite another to supplicate ourselves to the wrong-headed, ill-informed assumption that play cannot be a priority when times are hard.

Elsewhere at the Playwork conference this week, Wendy Russell spoke about an ethical framework for playwork. This is a fascinating topic, touching as it does on philosophy and human values and how these inform practice. It is impossible to engage in this area without considering morality: ethics is about finding or identifying a moral framework for decisions and actions. Yet morals are largely relative. People of different faiths, for example, may hold very different moral perspectives on the same issue because of the different values of their traditions.

Humans Rights are not subject to this relativism. They are universally declared and universally agreed. Children’s Rights are human rights – perhaps the most important category of human rights in the sense that all children are dependent on adult society; our duty to them is absolute.

Respecting, fulfilling and protecting the right of all children to play are profound responsibilities, willingly taken on by the community of nations. This General Comment of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child demands that we, and our governments in particular, take a serious look at how well we are discharging them; and calls for us to do better.

Adrian Voce