Policy for Play

In the first of two reflections on this year’s Spirit of Adventure Play conference in Cardiff, Adrian Voce hears (again) about how children are (still) routinely denied their right to enjoy space to play, but takes heart from the Welsh Assembly Government’s unprecedented legislative response to the problem.

At the Spirit of Adventure Play conference on 16 May, Roger Hart, the New York-based academic and children’s rights advocate, addressed a now familiar dilemma. “What will it take” he posed, “to persuade parents and other gatekeepers of the importance of children’s access to public space, and to create places that they trust”.

Roger was here to tell us, that far from being a uniquely British problem, children’s proscription from the public realm is occurring to some degree throughout the developed world. He illustrated his point with some impressive maps showing the geography of different ages of children in an American suburb. The ‘free-range space’ of today’s 9-12 year olds was equivalent to that of the 5-8 year olds of the previous generation. And the freedom to roam of today’s 5-8s? Gone completely.

The need for evidence

The causes he cited for this creeping imprisonment of children in their homes were as familiar as the problem itself: traffic, fear of predators, poor planning. He also lamented the dearth of good evidence. The odd home zone case study, he said, is no substitute for robust comparative evaluation. Indeed, their is such a lack of data in this field, he confided, that he has himself presented fictitious charts to show the relative merits and otherwise of different types of community space for children – just to be able to make his point (as a respected academic, he hastened to add, he admitted his deception on each occasion)!

The second keynote speaker, landscape architect, lecturer and author, Helen Wooley continued the theme of children and public space, presenting a study of how this is negatively controlled by policy and practice. Looking at the experience of skateboarders – a community, she reminded us, that is highly social and self-regulating – Helen drew a convincing, if depressingly familiar picture of a world in which the physical space that young people would use is routinely proscribed from them by economic and even legal mechanisms that reflect a socio-cultural rejection of youth, based on nothing more than blind prejudice.

Kit, fence and carpet

Helen also challenged the idea that many of the spaces that are prescribed for children – public playgrounds – are really places for them at all. Uniquely among the hierarchy of public spaces, the traditional playground, she asserts, generally has no design concept but is a simple receptacle for the ‘kit, fence and carpet (KFC)’ whose play value is often negligible. Careful to acknowledge that there are honorable exceptions among equipment manufacturers, Helen was nonetheless damning of the industry, not least in the way she says it too readily ducks the charge that it has reduced play to a series of gross motor tests – blaming, instead, the commissioning authorities.

Both speakers congratulated Wales on its latest response to these issues: the Welsh Assembly Government’s Consultation on Statutory Guidance on Play Opportunities, launched on 13 April. This follows on from the Children and Families (Wales) Measure 2010, which set out a legal duty on Local Authorities to assess the sufficiency of play opportunities in their area and confirms Wales as the country most committed to creating a legal policy framework for a child-friendly, playable public realm.

Roger Hart, in particular, praised the consultation document (“a great bedtime read!”), but also sounded a note of caution. To generate the demand for real changes to public space, he says, we have to persuade parents and other gatekeepers of the full range of benefits that free play brings. To then turn this demand into reality needs to involve engaging children in truly participatory local planning and design processes for their own neighbourhoods. He was critical of some participation practice as tokenistic (“attending committee meetings twice a year, or answering a load of questions”), and called for more hands-on, three-dimensional activities that really allow children to contribute.

This, he suggests will lead to a self-fulfilling virtuous cycle resulting in genuinely child-friendly public spaces in our towns and cities. Involving children at a very local level, he says, will not only mitigate against poor planning decisions, but engender the kind of civic culture that makes for more livable communities in general: people will come to trust places that they have helped to create, feel more affinity with their neighbours and, over time, be more inclined to let their own children play out as a result.

Unprecedented

Whether the unprecedented legislative measures taken by the Welsh will indeed have the effect that Roger and Helen and so many others hope for, remains to be seen. One thing is for sure: these developments (for which Play Wales should be given huge credit), give the lie to the notion that play policy is only viable in times of economic prosperity.

Two years after scrapping the national play strategy for England and replacing it, so far, with absolutely nothing, ministers in Westminster should reflect on what Wales is doing for its children, and hang their heads in shame.

Adrian Voce

After the death of author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, Adrian Voce suggests that the modern world should heed his view of children

Anyone looking to understand children better could do worse than to study the most popular children’s authors.

Books by Julia Donaldson, Michael Rosen, Tony Ross and others beautifully illustrate how children confront their fears, express their uniqueness and resolve problems through play. The most classic story arc involves a child protagonist – or surrogate – embarking on a dangerous or uncertain odyssey and then returning to the safety of home (often, literally, to bed) after overcoming challenges. They usually do this by resorting to the more obvious gifts of childhood such as innocence, ingenuity or unconditional love. Less commonly, they find gifts within the ‘darker side’ of their playfulness. For slightly older children, Roald Dahl was of course the master storyteller who understood very well the joy and power of ‘being naughty’.

And so, to Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of Where the Wild Things Are. Rightly regarded as a children’s classic, selling 17 million copies worldwide since its publication in 1963, this short picture book has had a profound influence on the genre, as recognised by the many tributes from the literary world and beyond that have greeted Sendak’s death at 83.

The book and its popularity tell us something important about children. The story’s protagonist is a small boy, Max, who dresses as a wolf to make ‘mischief of one kind and another’. When his mother admonishes him, Max threatens to eat her. Banished to his room, he is transported to ‘where the wild things are’. There, rather than having to curb his temper, he finds it gives him a magical power over the monsters and beasts he finds there. He summons them to join him in an almighty ‘wild rumpus’ and is accordingly made king of the place before returning to ‘where someone loves him best of all’, and his dinner ‘was still hot’.

Max and friends enjoy a ‘wild rumpus’.

No playworker needs telling that Sendak’s book captures something elemental that the modern world tends to deny or suppress: that children have extraordinary power. In celebrating this in all its glory, ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ challenges the view of children as victims and innocents. The best play environments give children the space and afford them the opportunities to fully explore and express this side of their nature.

This is why many play practitioners rail against the way formal education is so often delivered. In requiring so much conformity to rules of behaviour, they are concerned that it denies the child’s true potential.

There is another point here for play advocates, and those we seek to influence. ‘Wild play’ is not a reference to natural or ‘wild’ places so much as to the types of playing that they engender and support. Thus, whilst making common cause with the environmental movement wherever this helps to progress our aims, we must nevertheless be always mindful that play is the thing.

The outdoor learning and the children and nature movements may be natural allies (no pun intended), but the play movement is about creating space for children. For, as the wild things themselves have to concede, the boy, Max is ‘the most wild thing of all’.

Adrian Voce

It may be more congruent with a rights-based approach, writes Adrian Voce, but promoting ‘free-range childhoods’ alone will be less effective without also highlighting their absence – and ‘nature deficit disorder’ is as good a way as any.

The recent debate about the relative merits of the terms ‘nature deficit disorder’ and ‘free-range childhood’ as part of the play movement’s campaigning lexicon reminded me of another metaphor which might help to place the debate in a wider policy context and show that they each have their benefits and limitations.

If you haven’t followed this debate, it was initiated – in the current instance at least – when Wendy Russell took up a challenge laid down by Catherine Prisk, Play England’s director, to identify a ‘rallying cry’ that was as effective as nature deficit disorder in getting our message across. Wendy had criticised Cath’s use of the term in a tweet from Play England’s Play and Health seminar in March. Wendy’s subsequent guest blog on Love Outdoor Play explained why. The term tends to medicalise the problem, she argued, framing children as deficient and passive. This “over-protective, child-centred construct of need”, she says “creates dependent children” and is therefore a self-defeating approach.

Wendy advocated rather the use of a different metaphor, ‘free-range childhood’ because, she said, it “acknowledges children’s own ability to take time and space for play if the conditions are right. It constructs the problem as being with the way things are set up, not with children themselves”.

Tim Gill joined the debate on his ‘Rethinking Childhood’ site, suggesting that, while he shares some of Wendy’s reservations, there is much to commend the ‘nature deficit disorder’ banner and the Children and Nature Movement it represents. “Far from medicalising children” he argued,  “(it) is bringing into sharp focus the role of the environment, institutions, culture and wider society in shaping their lives”.

I too have some problems with the nature deficit disorder metaphor. One is simply that it might not be widely understood to be a metaphor. When terms pass into common usage they can give rise to myths not intended by their creator. The medical language here could be misconstrued in the popular media as having a literal meaning. This could damage the credibility of the movement and lead to accusations of moral panic making. Another reservation is that the use of medical language as a metaphor can sometimes cause offence to those dealing with real medical conditions. Appropriating medical terms to describe what is really an aggregated set of social phenomena with projected public health consequences – even metaphorically – could be seen to belittle these problems, which have not always been, and are still sometimes not taken as seriously as they deserve to be.

But free-range childhood is a slightly uncomfortable metaphor too, conjuring up the image of children as a species of livestock that we need to husband correctly (before rounding them up for slaughter?!).

Metaphors have their limitations, but my friend and colleague Arthur Battram has coined one that is highly relevant to this debate.

Arthur likes to talk (possibly with his tongue in his cheek, where it spends a good deal of time) about the Pink Bicycle Indicator (PBI), which would see the presence of pink children’s bikes lying around the neighbourhood as a proxy indicator of children having a good amount of freedom to play out. The bikes and the fact that they are left unattended around the place is evidence, in this scenario, of both outdoor play and a safe, trustworthy playable community.

The PBI arises within Arthur’s discourse about the ‘Skylark and Canary’ approaches to policy-making. Societies – and the governments acting for them – tend to come to important decisions by two quite different routes, he argues. In the Skylark approach, the prevalence of skylarks – known by scientists to thrive only when a certain number of environmental criteria are met – is taken as a proxy indicator for bio-diversity. A healthy skylark population would therefore be seen as evidence of a more generally thriving wildlife. Measures that increase the skylark population would be good for the environment in general.

This form of policy-making is less common, says Arthur’s thesis, than the ‘Canary’ approach. Until as recently as 1986, canaries were used in coalmines to detect poisonous gases which might be otherwise undetectable until too late. Quite simply, a dead canary in the cage was an indication of danger and the need to change course – or retreat altogether.

Working with or for children, we should be mindful of Wendy’s caution about the deficit model. The disability rights movement has progressed hugely since it found a framework and a model for debate that clarified the meaning of the language of disability in terms that are more empowering. The social model of disability is a powerful concept that has relevance beyond how we see and respond to disabled people. I think Wendy makes the point well that children too can be – often are – disempowered by being framed as deficient in the language that we use even as we seek to liberate and empower them. Her support for a ‘free-range childhood’ campaign is consistent with her long-held advocacy for a social model of childhood which places play at the heart of a re-evaluation of our concept of children’s rights and children’s agency. It is important work and has much to offer this movement.

However, we live in a world were policy is made most often, not according to a vision for an empowered populace, but in reaction to the problems which are receiving the most headlines – or producing the most dead canaries. The childhood obesity epidemic, for example, is a symptom, surely, of a wide range of restrictions, constraints and infringements of children’s rights. A Skylark approach to policy for children’s health would simply envisage environments that science (and common sense) tells us provide optimum opportunity for healthful activity and wholesome diets (which we have already agreed under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child) and set about providing them as widely as possible. An indicator of how well we were doing? Well, counting pink bicycles wouldn’t  be far off the mark. Instead, we have waited until you couldn’t move for dead canaries. Except of course that in this case, the ‘canaries’ are not expendable. Obese children are not just a proxy indicator.

Given the reactive nature of policy-making (which, after all, must reflect the culture within which it happens), perhaps then we do need our own negative rallying cries. People rally to causes when they can identify a problem that needs addressing. Amplifying a message to reach the widest audience has risks. The media can be voracious and unscrupulous, with truth and accuracy often seeming to be less important than sensation and impact. But this is the campaigning game. The trick is to use the media to convey the more nuanced messages once we have the opportunity. But we do have to attract its attention first.

Nature Deficit Disorder, for all its limitations, has encapsulated a particular set of problems that people can identify with and recognise. It may oversimplify some complex issues but “children aren’t getting outside enough and it’s bad for them” is not the worst kind of dead canary that we could use. And to have the opportunity to fully make the policy case, we also need to encapsulate the solution – without compromising our vision for it – in a way that is equally suited to the sound-biting, twittering age we live in.

Here, Free-Range Childhoods, I think, makes for a rather good skylark.

Adrian Voce

In this recent interview with Play and Sports Matters magazine (reproduced with the kind permission of the publishers) Adrian Voce argues that the Government’s abandonment of the Play Strategy is a good reason for play professionals and advocates to redouble their efforts to make the case for play policy at every level.

Play England, the national charity for children’s play, was forced to downsize drastically last year after the government decided not to renew its national contracts after March 2011. Play England, and the Children’s Play Council (CPC) before it, had held a variety of government contracts since 1999. As director of Play England, Adrian Voce had the onerous task of rationalising the very organisation he’d established in 2006, to reflect its reduced circumstances.

Voce had led the successful campaign to secure £155m from the national lottery, which enabled the establishment of Play England to work with local authorities and their partners to plan strategically for more and better play provision across the country. He was also the government’s main advisor on the £235m Play Strategy, for which Play England became the national delivery partner, working with every local authority in England to create around 3,000 new play areas and 30 staffed adventure playgrounds as well as establishing new benchmarks for planning, design and risk management in children’s free play provision.

Transition

The cuts signaled a transition not only for Play England, but also for Voce, who after managing the restructuring stepped down from Play England as part of a wider restructuring by its parent body, the National Children’s Bureau (NCB) – but not before making his feelings known. Speaking at an event to mark his departure, Voce accused the coalition government of betraying a generation of children by abandoning the 10-year play strategy and cutting every penny of national funding for play provision and play policy.

Six months on and Voce has just collected an OBE for services to children. He is still working in the field, which he loves – advising play associations and local providers on how to sustain play provision without a national strategy – at the same time as continuing to make the case for a policy framework for play. Despite the difficulties facing the sector, he remains sanguine.

“Play policy was a rather unnecessary victim of the austerity measures. There had been no money pledged after 2011 anyway. Playbuilder finished in March 2011 and the remaining seven years of the Play Strategy wasn’t more government funding for playgrounds but about embedding play provision within local planning and commissioning; developing and strengthening play partnerships so that planners, police, parks and highways understood their role. Unfortunately, the ‘back to basics’ approach of Michael Gove at DfE has meant the government dropping play completely, at least for now” he says.

Resourceful

However, this is a sector that is used to operating without central funding. “The Play Strategy achieved some good things, but not as much as it should have, if a version of it had been retained. £235m is less than Sheffield’s education budget for one year. It’s not a huge amount of money compared to the scale of the need and therefore, in terms of impact, its not loss of funding but the reverse in the dismantling of the play policy framework that is the real blow. However, there was never much play policy before, and the play movement is resourceful; it will pick itself up and get going again,“ says Voce.

And, arguably, it is in a stronger position to do so. Play England may have suffered severe cuts but it is still three times larger than CPC was in 2006. It will become independent of NCB this year and has secured alternative funding – including a grant from the Cabinet Office to lead the “Free Time Consortium” which should, suggests Voce, help it to sow the seeds for a new government play policy. From its leading role over this period, Play England enjoys a much higher profile than CPC ever did. It has a good track record (until it was cut, the Play Strategy delivered) and connections into the heart of government.

Notwithstanding its change of fortunes under the coalition, Voce believes that if Play England can consolidate its constituents into a strong, engaged and unified membership, it will continue go from strength to strength, albeit on a more gradual trajectory than the roller coaster of the last six years. He hopes so anyway: “the play movement needs a strong, independent national champion and not to be so dependent on larger children’s charities who tend to support it only when the sun is shining, or put their own interpretation onto what we mean by good provision”, he says.

The wider sector, too, should be able to recover from the shock of austerity, thinks Voce. Largely thanks to Play England, which has worked closely with API and its members to produce a range of popular guidance documents, it has broadened its knowledge base, and has a better understanding of design, risk, maintenance, and participation, as well as more experience of local planning and commissioning practice.

Shaping public space

But the sector still has a long way to go, he says, particularly in helping to shape play areas in public space. “The industry needs to see itself as a contributor to the wider shape and nature of the public realm.  I’d like to see it working more with architects, planners and landscapers – as well as play practitioners – to integrate great designs for play into our community spaces. Children need to be able to play in the streets, on their way to school and in the places where they live, not just in designated playgrounds.”

There are more examples of this blurring between playgrounds and public spaces in Europe, he says, where often the best play advocates hail not from the children’s sector, but rather from the planning and landscaping arenas. This is the case in Holland, where residential streets are more often designed to be shared equally by people and vehicles in shared spaces, where the car is no longer king and children can play out safely in their immediate neighbourhoods.

“The new Exhibition Road scheme in London is an example of this shared space concept, but we need this kind of project scaled down – home zones in all residential streets – if we are to get children playing outside the way they need to. The one thing that keeps kids inside more than anything else is traffic. Parked cars dominate our streets so there’s no space to play, and then there’s the real danger of fast moving vehicles,” says Voce.

Policy framework

He’d also like to see more playworkers and play rangers and a continuation of the regrowth of adventure playgrounds. Above all Voce wants a policy framework for all this to happen. “If we think play is important and a basic right for children, there needs to be space available for them to play in: public space. I just can’t see how that is ever going to happen with the increasing demands on space unless we have a policy framework,” he says.

The coalition government “completely washed its hands of play” last year, so it’s up to the sector to work together with allies to get play back on the national agenda. “Play is still considered a less important area, partly because children’s voices are ignored. So we have to stand up for them. As a signatory of the UN Charter on the Rights of the Child, the state has a legal obligation to ensure children can play. Governments must be held to account for it.”

The sector has a fight on its hands, says Voce, who has launched his own campaign to remake the case for government action on play. The aim of www.policyforplay.com is to provide a resource and forum for anyone trying to promote, campaign for, develop or sustain policy for play at any level of government. “The government may have scrapped its play policy, but we’re not going to take that lying down.”

The fight goes on.

Vicky Kiernander

Editor, Play and Sports Matters

The Mayor’s consultation on new Supplementary Planning Guidance, means that children’s play space, in London at least, will still be afforded some protection by the planning framework, says Adrian Voce.

The Mayor of London is the ultimate planning authority for the capital and its region, with responsibility for long-term spatial development. His strategy for this is known simply as the London Plan.

One of my proudest achievements as director of the charity London Play was to successfully promote commitments to children’s play within this overarching strategy for the city. As a consequence of the first London Plan including a policy to protect and secure space for children’s play, London Play was commissioned by the Mayor to draft guidance on developing play strategies for the London Boroughs. (The Mayor’s play policy proved to have influence beyond London as the Big Lottery Fund’s Children’s Play Initiative of 2006 drew heavily on his approach; influencing, in turn, the last Government’s 2008 Play Strategy).

The Mayor then set out to establish some new benchmark standards for play space itself, in the form of Supplementary Planning Guidance (SPG), which was drafted for the Mayor by a team including Tim Gill, and issued in 2008.

The current mayor is now replacing the first London Plan with a new one extending to 2031. The SPG for play is consequently being reviewed. The consultation document was published today along with details of how to respond (see the link below).

It is a mark of how far we have come in play policy – and hugely important for future generations of children in London – that the current Mayor wants to retain a commitment to play provision within the planning framework for the capital. Now let’s make sure he gets the fullest and best possible response from play advocates and practitioners.

Shaping Neighbourhoods: Children and Young People’s Play and Informal Recreation SPG | Greater London Authority.