“Play is essential for children’s development”; that’s according to the statutory framework for the early years foundation stage (EYFS). But “play” is not always easy to define, which can make it difficult for early years teachers to make sense of how we should interpret this statement in practice.
Perhaps the most useful definition I’ve seen comes in a 2022 paper, in which Yeshe Colliver and colleagues report the findings of a major longitudinal study in Australia. They looked at how young children themselves define play and found that children are “more likely to consider an activity as play when they choose its rules” and less likely to see an activity as play when “adult structure” is imposed.
The researchers, therefore, conclude that unstructured free play may be “considered the most ‘play-like’ form of play”.
But is unstructured play valuable to children’s development?
Early years: What’s the evidence for unstructured play?
There is some evidence that this type of play is best for supporting the development of children’s self-regulation. In the study above, the researchers found that “the amount of time children engaged in unstructured quiet play at home in their toddler and preschool years modestly predicted their self-regulation abilities two years later, including in the first years of elementary school”.
This is an interesting finding, though it’s worth noting the context of play at home rather than in an early years setting.
Self-regulation is certainly important: American researcher Clancy Blair reported in 2009 that kindergarten (Reception) teachers saw the ability to self-regulate as crucial to school readiness.
Is giving children free access to a range of resources enough to improve their self-regulation, though?
As it turns out, it isn’t quite that simple. Children are only developing their self-regulation through play if they are learning how to make intentional choices. If they are just picking resources at random and filling the available time, it probably won’t make much difference to their development.
Ironically, unstructured play needs very careful structuring to be effective. The evidence-based Curriculum, Leadership and Interaction Quality Rating Scales, published by UCL IOE Press, can help us to provide that structure in the background, so children’s freely chosen play can be valuable to their development.
But there is more to play in the early years than free, unstructured play. It’s helpful to consider play as a spectrum. At the other end, we have adult-guided play. This is where the adult is sensitive to the child’s interests and enjoyment but also aims to direct the play towards certain learning outcomes. This type of play helps children to develop their understanding of key ideas, as well as their problem solving and persistence.
For example, an adult can give feedback to a child who has chosen to play with jigsaw puzzles, helping them towards the final achievement of fitting all the pieces together by showing them how to rotate a shape to fit it in.
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Sensitive adult involvement in children’s play, careful open-ended questioning and offering formative feedback during activities were all found to be important indicators of quality provision by the Effective Provision of Preschool Education (EPPE) project, the biggest longitudinal study of early years education and care in England and Northern Ireland.
In particular, researchers on the project found that more “sustained shared thinking” (SST) was observed in settings where children made the most progress. According to the research team from the Institute of Education (IOE), University College London and the University of Oxford, SST occurs when “two or more individuals work together in an intellectual way to solve a problem, clarify a concept, evaluate an activity, extend a narrative, etc”. They add that “both parties must contribute to the thinking and it must develop and extend”.
In SST, either the adult or the child might outline a problem to solve or a goal to reach. Maybe the goal is to create a moat filled with water around the sandcastle. As the child fills the moat, and the water drains away, the adult can sensitively explore why this might be happening, in partnership with the child. The adult here is the co-player, co-experimenter and co-thinker, taking care not to advance solutions too quickly, which may curtail the child’s own processes of reasoning.
It’s important to remember that the roots of this approach lie in effective early communication support for all children. If we are not careful, chatty, confident children who have a lot of previous experience of learning through play will do really well in play-based sessions while unseen children who spend little or no time in conversation with adults or their peers are unlikely to make similar progress.
The evidence-informed ShREC and Talking Time approaches can help us to make sure that every child accesses high-quality communication support, while the Nuffield Early Language Intervention can offer a safety net for any child who needs additional help.
Play-based learning must also be inclusive - it must work for children with special educational needs and disabilities. For autistic children, for instance, this might mean we need to allow time for what seems like repetitive behaviours (like lining up toy cars). These actions are often important for the child, calming them and helping them into the mindset they need for play. Observational evidence suggests that we can, if we are not careful, intervene too fast to refocus this type of activity. We should wait a little longer for play to emerge, guiding children sensitively if appropriate.
Play-based learning is fundamental to successful early education, but it is not an easy option. All types of play are important for children’s learning, from the completely unstructured play to activities sensitively guided by adults.
No single approach to play is adequate on its own - and if there is one thing we can be sure about, it’s that “play” is not as simple as the word implies.
Julian Grenier is a former Tes columnist and nursery school leader. He would like to thank professors Iram Siraj, Jenny Gibson and Kathy Sylva for their help in writing this article
