Lessons are learned there but it isn’t a classroom. Rules are followed there but they’re not all set by the teachers. It’s a place where a school bag can become a goal post and a coat a magic cape; a place occupied by children but where the grown-ups look on.

It is, of course, a playground. These are spaces where children and young people spend around 20 per cent of their school day. And yet they are also largely unregulated, unstructured and unthought of parts of education. Indeed, many see them as a “break” from education. This perception could be problematic because research suggests that if we care about pupil outcomes, we need to recognise the importance of the playground and what happens there much more than we currently do.

Play as a teaching tool is on the wane in schools. Ed Baines, senior lecturer in childhood and development at University College London, explains that, although the importance of play is widely recognised for the youngest learners at school, once a child reaches late key stage 2, or key stage 3, many assume that play simply doesn’t matter as much. As such, it disappears from their lessons.

Government policies that focus on more direct instruction and accountability have combined to drive this shift, and even with the youngest pupils, less “play” and more “at-desk” learning seems to be a preference of the current government.

This is occurring at the same time that opportunities for free, unstructured play are reducing owing to depleting time given over for breaktimes. In a study conducted into school breaktimes and lunchtimes, Baines and his colleagues found that “on average, primary students in key stage 1 are getting 85 minutes [of playtime] a day, key stage 2 76 minutes and then, in secondary, this drops to just 64 minutes.”

When we compare this data to the average times for children of the same age back in 1995, we’re looking at cuts of 45 minutes a week in primary and 65 minutes a week in secondary.

“We find there has been a reduction in the amount of breaktime in KS2 but there has been a severe reduction in the breaktime for secondary school students,” says Baines.

Why is this happening? Breaktimes are seen as an easy sacrifice: schools are for learning and we need to have students doing that more, so we cut the breaks and extend the lessons. Such a move, though, wilfully disregards the research that says breaks are integral to learning, and to the ability or willingness of a child to learn. And with the current depletion of play in classrooms, those breaks become even more key.

Anthony Pellegrini, a professor of education who recently retired from the University of Minnesota, knows this more than most, having conducted experiments at elementary schools in the US that clearly demonstrated how important the playground can be. Pupils were given standardised tasks before and after breaktime without them knowing when breaktime would be. By measuring their levels of attention during the tasks, he was able to demonstrate that children were more attentive after a break than before it.

He also looked at the links between pupils’ attainment between Kindergarten (Year 1) and First Grade (Year 2), and their levels of social interaction with peers in the playground. He found that pupils who stuck closely to the adults at breaktimes tended to be less socially competent than their peers - and that they attained less highly as a result.

“When kids are interacting with other kids, it’s socially, cognitively and linguistically very complicated because they have to negotiate,” he explained to Tes in 2018. “This is one of the reasons why it predicts achievement. If your aim is to make kids socially competent, turn them loose and have them interact with each other. That’s how kids become socially competent with minimal adult intervention.”

Baines agrees. “It’s a mistake to assume that children aren’t learning in playgrounds,” he says. “If you’ve provided a good, well-resourced space with lots of useful materials, you can really encourage the kids to be more creative, to explore their own interests, to become experts in designing things and building dens. All those skills can then be utilised in different ways.”

Robust evidence

But just how far do the skills that children develop on the playground translate into better learning outcomes in the classroom?

According to the late David Whitebread, a developmental cognitive psychologist and former acting director of the Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning at the University of Cambridge, there are two areas where the evidence about the benefits of play is particularly robust.

The first, as Pellegrini mentioned, is language development. “There is good evidence that being involved in imaginative play, either with an adult or with other children, is advantageous in terms of young children’s language development,” he told Tes in 2019.

The second area is self-regulation (the ability to recognise your own mental processes and take control of them). This is particularly important, Whitebread pointed out, because studies have shown that self-regulation can be a stronger predictor of success than early reading; if a person can regulate their attention as a four-year-old, they are more likely to do better academically, go to a better university and get a better class of degree.

If you look at the research, the benefits of play are undeniable. So why, then, are so many schools reducing breaktimes? Why is time spent on the playground not seen as valuable learning time?

It may be that we are not using playgrounds or setting them up in a way that delivers those positive learning results, suggests Michael Follett, founder and director of Outdoor Play and Learning, a non-profit organisation that aims to help all children access outstanding play opportunities, regardless of their gender, race, ability or location.

Follett, who has previously worked as a playworker, teacher and school improvement officer, and who wrote the book Creating Excellence in Primary School Playtimes, says that although there are many different types of play that children engage in, playgrounds are usually only set up to cater for one.

“The set-up of a playground where you have one large field or one large concrete area to play on is designed to allow what we call ‘locomotor play’,” he explains. “But locomotor play, where a child runs around, usually with a ball game involved, is just one type of play. There are 16 different types of play children engage with, and playgrounds just aren’t set up to meet the needs for these other types.”

So, what are those other types of play? Follett says they vary from communication play (you say “raspberry”, I say “banana”), to sociodramatic play (acting out scary moments or domestic scenes), to object play (using skipping ropes to mark out horse jumps).

“You do need an enriched play environment in order for those other 15 play types to be able to flourish,” he says.

The list of play types that Follett refers to was devised by play theorist Bob Hughes and set out in his 2006 book, A Playworker’s Taxonomy of Play Types (see box, below). While other theorists present different ideas about the exact number of play types that exist, there is widespread agreement that there are more than one - and that catering for different types of play is important because those different types serve different functions in a young person’s development.

Take, for instance, what Rachel Nesbit, a chartered psychologist and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter calls “adventurous play”. She has researched the links between adventurous play and childhood anxiety, and found that taking part in adventurous play can help children to better manage anxiety.

Nesbit says that when you look at “risk markers” for anxiety, one key sign you commonly see is that a young person will have an “intolerance of uncertainty”.

“What we mean by that is when children or adolescents don’t like uncertain situations and they don’t know how to cope when they find themselves faced with uncertainty,” she explains.

Adventurous play - such as balancing on a tyre or running very quickly down a steep hill - exposes children to feelings of uncertainty and the physiological symptoms that come with that. For example, they might feel a little sick, or their heart might race or they might start sweating. Giving children opportunities to experience these symptoms in a safe and controlled way can help to prevent them from developing an intolerance of those feelings in future, says Nesbit.

Having playgrounds that offer opportunities for different types of play is not only vital for learning but also for wellbeing, then. And supporting wellbeing, in turn, feeds back into better educational and pastoral outcomes.

According to the mental health charity YoungMinds, evidence shows that better wellbeing provision in schools can lead to significant improvements in children’s social and emotional skills, and can also lead to reductions in classroom misbehaviour and bullying.

What’s more, Follett says, school leaders need to be aware that different pupils will be more inclined towards some types of play than others and so, if possible, there needs to be a sense of equity in the variety of play that is on offer, to make playgrounds more inclusive.

“All children need to experience all types of play,” he says. “We can’t generalise, like ‘boys do this and girls do that’. However, I’ve worked in playgrounds for 20 years and, from observation, probably 20-30 per cent of mainly boys dominate around 80 per cent of the space - and schools grossly encourage that.”

The issue is driven, he claims, by a mistaken belief that some pupils - usually boys - are more likely to need to be kept “out of trouble” at breaktimes, which means that they are often allowed to dominate the space for boisterous play at the detriment of those pupils - often girls - who might prefer to engage in a quieter type of play.

“[Teachers] will say: ‘The boys need that space because, if they don’t get to play their football, they will kick off’,” says Follett. “Then [schools] will invest £60,000 to £80,000 in building a Muga [multi-use games area - a fenced area with built-in goal posts for various types of sports games] for them, and they’ve just invested £60,000 in boys and not in girls.”

However, Carrie Paechter, director of the Nottingham Centre for Children, Young People and Families at Nottingham Trent University’s School of Social Sciences - who studies the connection between childhood, identity and gender - says that, while schools do need to cater to the play preferences of different groups of pupils, they should be cautious about reinforcing stereotypes.

“There’s a misconception that girls would really like to just do colouring at playtime and that girls don’t want to run around after about [the age of] 9 or 10,” she says.

“Another misconception is that boys and girls don’t play together - they actually do play together. They will play football, they’ll play whole-class chasing games and do it unproblematically. One common belief is that girls won’t throw or play aggressively. This is wrong - they do play aggressively.”

Divide and conquer

So, what can schools do to create more egalitarian spaces without playing into stereotypes - and without making behaviour a nightmare to police? It’s not about bulldozing those Mugas. Instead, leaders need to take a more considered approach when it comes to investing in playground equipment and facilities to ensure they are catering for a diversity of play, say Susannah Walker and Imogen Clark, activists who founded the Make Space for Girls campaign, which seeks to make public spaces and facilities as welcoming to teenage girls as they are to teenage boys.

Walker suggests that there are some easy and cost-effective changes that can make a difference.

“We’ve seen big improvements by playing music on to the playground, or by dividing the space up into smaller areas, so groups of young people can each use their own space and there isn’t one big space being dominated,” she says.

She also suggests providing different types of seating, which allows children to choose whether to sit facing one another or to sit side by side, in line with their preferences.

Follett agrees that simple things like seating arrangements can make a big difference in promoting social, imaginative and creative play. “When we socialise, we like social spaces that are nice. When you meet down the pub for a drink, you wouldn’t expect to stand in the middle of the car park and be given a drink. You go in because the seating is arranged sociably, the lighting is nice and the chairs are comfortable,” he says.

Paechter, meanwhile, recommends including “a dance space”, which she describes as an area that is prominent enough that it “feels stage-like but not so the entire playground can see”, which would provide alternative play opportunities for those pupils who want to be active without necessarily taking part in the locomotor play that others might prefer.

Yes, dividing playgrounds up into smaller, more inclusive spaces that encourage different types of play might mean that schools will have to sacrifice that one big open space that is ideal for playing football, for example - but Paechter says that this wouldn’t inevitably make behaviour more difficult to manage.

“There is a school of thought that if you have enough interesting stuff going on, that behaviour doesn’t need as much policing,” she says.

The crucial thing here is that there is adequate behaviour support on the playground. Members of staff on duty should be trained to manage behaviour well and there should be enough of them out there to respond to incidents effectively.

“It’s a misconception that one lunchtime assistant can look after an entire playground, practically,” says Paechter.

This might mean that schools will need to hire additional lunchtime supervisors and invest in upskilling them, or take another look at their timetabling to accommodate more teaching staff being on duty.

Another brick in the wall

There will be costs associated with this but Follett believes it is just as important to invest in playground supervision as it is to invest in play equipment. That means making sure that supervisors are trained to manage behaviour and to have a good understanding of how to support different types of play.

Follett gives an example of a time when he was observing children engaging in recapitulative play (play that allows children to explore ancestry, history and rituals).

“I was in a playground in Bristol and a group of boys had found a red brick, and they were rubbing it on top of the wall, and they made a red powder,” he recounts. “And then one of them spat on the powder and made it into a paste. And the other is like, ‘Wow, that is so cool!’ And then one of them grabbed one of the grey bricks and said, ‘Guys, I wonder if this will make grey stuff?’. So they did, and then they got the red stuff and the grey stuff, and they marked their faces. Now, that was like triple-layered recapitulative play because they had discovered paint, body marking and tribes.”

Yet, when the boys rushed up to the midday assistant to show her what they had done, Follett explains that she immediately admonished the group, telling them that “bricks are dangerous”. The play, and the learning benefits that came with it, stopped.

And whatever staff do when managing behaviour, the last thing they should resort to is taking playtime away as a punishment, Paechter stresses.

“One thing that some schools do, if there’s trouble at playtime, is they reduce their breaktimes. [I’ve seen schools where they] cut the lunch break because people were getting into fights rather than actually doing something about what was going on at lunchtime,” she says.

Perhaps the answer is that, rather than thinking of the playground as a space that is separate from the classroom, we need to start thinking of it more as an extension of it. That doesn’t mean taking away the unstructured nature of playtime but it does mean that we may need to start considering the pedagogy of the playground - and paying as much attention to how play environments are equipped, managed and staffed as we do to those things in the classroom.

Grainne Hallahan is senior content writer at Tes

This article originally appeared in the 23 July 2021 issue under the headline “All work and no play”