Dr. Alistair Bryce-Clegg, otherwise known as ABC, is an international early years consultant and trainer with three decades of experience in the sector. He's an author, a speaker, and author of the PlayList. He's advised the government's Education Select Committee on Early Years policy and practice and even the Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood. He has even had a debut on the TV in the BAFTA-winning Old People's Home for Four-Year-Olds.
Alistair advocates for more open-ended, "deconstructed" role play areas, to support childrens' own creativity.
"You tend to get post offices, Chinese restaurants, and hairdressers," explains Alistair, "Places that children don't frequent and that need a lot of background information to allow access. They actually disable learning rather than enable it. We'll say things like, well, it's spring, so let's have a garden centre. And we'll spend ages making a gorgeous garden centre with plastic gladioli with price tags for 4 pence each. And we'll have pots and seeds and a till. And then we'll put children who've never been in a garden centre on their own, without an adult, and expect them to do all of the things that we ideally want a role play space to do."
Instead, Alistair recommeds settings offer more ambiguous resources so the role-play is child-led, rather than enforcing a theme or specific location. Alistair recommends things that children can use to create their own resources, like:
"Think about what those areas are provisioned are for - that's usually my starting point in training - why would you have a role play area? What is it that we want children to learn through role play interactions? And we get a really good skills list going like verbal cues, non verbal cues, interaction, storytelling, resolution, all of the things that we'd have. Then, if I put this three-year-old, four-year-old in the post office (where they've never ever been) or in a Chinese restaurant, am I enabling all of these skills to occur or am I actually narrowing things so far down that they'll only give me domestic play or superhero weapon play?"
Are your provocations really doing what you think they are? Does every opportunity to play need an objective attached? Alistair says no. A tuff tray with colours or blocks and a sign saying, "Can you match the colours?" isn't learning through play.
"I work with senior leaders who will say things like, 'I need to see attainment and therefore I ask all my staff to put an objective onto every activity to put out', which is again, ridiculous because children just don't do it," explains Alistair, "But I also see loads of social media accounts, which worryingly have like hundreds of thousands of followers. That is basically...rubbish. The issue with that is that the children who can can, and so they've learned nothing. The children who can't still can't. And what they're not, is play. So we talk about play based learning, but actually it's not play based learning at all because there's no element of play to it."
I think one of the great joys and why I've been now in early years for like 35 years is no matter what else is going on in your life, you cannot fail to smile at some point, even if you just spend half an hour in an early years space. Because no, the majority of children are just little bundles of joy... but they will give you a brutal character assassination.
Alistair explains Professor Peter Gray's definition of play, which is based on biology and psychology. Play is:
"There is a difference between playful learning and play based learning," explains Alistair, "As an adult, I'm really good at engaging children in playful learning where I bring the play. But if I was talking about play-based learning, I can't say, 'well, I'm going to do some play-based learning and it's with these resources and this is the outcome' because that just isn't the biological psychological definition of play."
So how do we, as Early Years educators, facsilitate play?
"If we are thinking about creating play spaces and play opportunities, it's about giving children open access to a range of resources," says Alistair, "And again, you can never take the adult completely out of the picture, because you will have curated those resources in some way, shape or form. It could be that you've carefully chosen them or that they're all you've got in your garage or your stock cupboard so you get out what you've got. But the real essence of play is that you give children opportunity time to engage in a space which has a collection of ideally fixed and open ended resources. You need some fixed purpose resources for children who have a limited experience of life remembering that imagination is not something you're born with.
We discuss the funny things children say, and Alistair talks about the difference between laughing with children and at them. He reminds listeners that we can't get it right with children 100% of the time, but that it's really important to repair any harm you might have caused.
"As an adult, as a professional, you would never laugh at a child who said or did something because of any kind of speech impediment or disability, anything like that," says Alistair, "But if a child does something and you laugh and then they respond negatively to you laughing (and it hasn't been done out of a way to kind of hurt or humiliate), it's not the end of the world. There's also some really good learning that can come out of that for both of you, if you are prepared to have that conversation with that child at that level, and say, 'I'm really sorry that I made you feel like that.'"
But what about, 'least said, soonest mended'?
"What I've learned, again through practice and parenting is that when you get it wrong, the worst thing you can do is think, oh, I got it wrong, and then run away and hide or just never speak about it again," says Alistair, "It's better to go and say, 'I got that wrong,' in language that's appropriate for the child that you're talking to. And this is how I feel. And I understand that's how you feel. And then by the making of it better and the discussing of how each other felt, you're actually taking learning forward for both of you."
Alistair explains that he used to be a huge advocate of old circle time... but not any more! After looking into research around children's engagement anxiety and authentic child development, Alistair says he's no longer a fan.
"I think there are amazing opportunities for children to gather together and share," explains Alistair, "I just don't see the value much in that kind of 20 children all sitting in a circle, all waiting their turn while somebody passes around a tambourine, and we all die of boredom. I think there are always going to be those children that are great pontificators, that will hold the floor, that will speak... and there will always be those children who are very reticent and nervous of that opportunity to publicly have a forum. We have to take all of that into account and create opportunities that exist for children to share, but not in that mass public forum on a daily basis."
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