The student was late for a tutorial. She apologised, explaining that her son had just been 'assessed'.
'He's three,' she said.
'What was the assessment for?' I asked.
'To see if he was three,' she replied.
'How old did you think he was?' I was moved to ask.
'Three,' she said.
'How old did he think he was?'
'He knew he was three, but now it's official.'
Many of us who have been preoccupied with the widening of childcare opportunities are pleased that we are drawing closer to the achievement of a degree of universal provision. At the same time, it is worth noting that there appear to be some concerns about recent policy-led Government initiatives with regard to children and young people. It is increasingly obvious that those charged with delivering provision across the broad range of services have misgivings as to the nature of the regimes currently on offer. There is growing disquiet about the intrusion of outcome checklists into the broad range of children's services in informal education - broadly speaking, nursery, early years, out-of-school, playwork and, more recently, youth work.
In the Government's urge to apply corrective policy - Sure Start and Connexions are two good examples - among the rights being lost in these adult-derived agendas for children, is the child's right to enjoy free play.
In situations where the bureaucratic need to measure and evaluate child development as an administrative function is paramount, it is easy to diminish the value of play and playing. As a consequence, we fill the child's day with activities and events that aid assessment, at the loss of their unstructured engagement in playing.
Reasons for play
Significantly, playwork has been one of the loudest of those voices against this blanket approach to the 'age and stage' mantras of measurement. Here the practice promotes a clear attitudinal difference in approach. A look at the most current theory and application from the playwork field could inform the way we attend to our children more widely.
Just as the opportunity to play is being eroded, the playwork discipline is developing important perspectives on the role of play and playing, and with it a powerful application - one that could have an impact across the boundaries of practice. In this new understanding, play and playing is seen as vital to human and humane development.
If we were in a position to observe the play of our forebears' children, we would note little difference between their play and those of a group of present-day children similarly occupied. The reason why children play extends far beyond the rationales of simple socialising and induction into adulthood. The purpose of play is to do with issues of survival, self and identity.
Playing has at its core a powerful adaptive functionality linked to human growth and development. The simple cue and response - the play cycles of the playing child - mirror the process of evolution itself. In the frames of their play, children create themes and motifs, which reflect and re-order their understanding of the world as it is and as they will go on to create it.
A play ecology exists, and if we damage the ecology, we harm those who live within it. For the greater part, the simple playing out of material, untrammelled by adult wishes and desires, means the very mechanism that provides a highly sophisticated balancing process, devised by nature to ensure survival and success, is in operation. But where we see the loss of the child's play habitat by disrupting the play process, we see the effects mirrored in children's behaviour.
Natural drive
I wonder whether the apparent rise in behavioural disorder, in emotional and learning difficulties, in the various syndromes being identified and in the epidemic of ADD/ADHD (220,000 children are on drug treatment in the UK, three million in the United States) is linked to this disruption of child's play?
What we know is that the need for children to play is hard-wired into the human mechanism. It is a drive, and we must play. If we do not play, and if we do not provide for children's play, then the drive will come out in ways that are unacceptable. It will become what my colleague Perry Else and I have termed 'dysplay'. Is what we are seeing, in the range of symptoms now being observed in children, a kind of dysplay?
Policy and practice
But don't just take our word for it. A number of key theorists within the playwork discipline are making some serious assertions. They relate directly to the attitudinal approach of professionals in children's services towards play and the playing child. The discipline's statement is that unless we change the philosophical constructs within which we work and reinstate free play and access to free play, we will see a rise in so-called 'disorders' in our children.
For confirmation of this we need look no further than the classroom.
Formerly, teachers might have described their young students by personality; now it is by prescription.
At present, it is not unusual for a child of rising three to spend up to 11 hours in some form of institutionalised care. This conscription into educare is to be extended by the Government, with schools as the focus of an overarching provision operating across the age ranges. The depth of provision has outreached our descriptions of practice.
In short, the philosophical underpinning of our work in informal education lags behind service delivery, yet it remains a Government manifesto priority.
Wraparound childcare is happening on a large scale. Recent figures suggest that there are now 500,000 people involved in full-time and part-time work with children and young people - numbers sufficient for the field to qualify, under EU definition, as an 'industry'. But qualification levels need to rush to catch up, and they are bound up with the servicing of outcome.
The vacuum between policy and practice is being filled by administrative obligation. We have turned teachers into civil servants in education. Is the same likely to happen in childcare?
It could be different, but it requires a re-visioning of our ideas of play and playing. This re-visioning should examine both the physical and non-physical aspects of our work. The change requires a polar shift in our attitude to child development.
The playing child is busy exploring their potential to be and to become.
The new approach is essentially 'ludocentric' - it places emphasis on the play of the child as being central to this developmental process. It demands that the child be seen as the subject of their own play, rather than as the object of measurement and evaluation. The objective application is that of the adult practitioner, evaluating their own interventions and their motivations for such intervention.
Clear choice
As professionals in the field, we have a clear choice to make and a position to argue about the way we regard our role in child development.
We can continue with forms of practice that inhibit natural maturing, where our work deepens the neuroticisation of childhood by adult fears and unnatural intervention, with all its attendant consequences. Or, we can trust that the play process itself will, out of its very nature, help our children to adapt and adjust to the world. Many of us are suggesting that the former is directly harming our children, while the latter works with innate natural instincts and contributes to child development in and through play.
The benefits of the trusting approach are twofold. First and most obvious, it places the adult in service of the playing processes of the child. The playspace and the content of the playing is ordered by the child or children. Playing and development interlace in existential meaning.
Adulteration is avoided.
The second benefit is less tangible but no less important. It is in contact with the playspace and the playing child that our own personal development as childcare professionals is located. This attitude to play and playing can work across disciplinary boundaries, regardless of the physical constraints of the environment. It suggests a return to play as a developmental necessity for both our own and our children's well-being.
Gordon Sturrock is a co-founder of Ludemos Associates, formed to promote and develop play theory and practice. See www.ludemos.co.uk.
