Early Years play is powerful. How do we protect it?

The power of play

Play is recognised as a fundamental, child-led process that integrates all aspects of children's development, learning, and well-being. Both Dr Stella Louis and Julia Manning-Morton emphasise that play belongs to children.

• Play helps children build connections between experiences, feelings, ideas, and relationships.
• Play is how children learn. Free play especially enables children to explore, investigate, experiment, and test theories, developing confidence, collaboration, and mastery.
• Julia describes play as "an integrating mechanism that children use to bring all parts and aspects of their experiences together."

The network of learning and schemas

Schematic behaviour is a critical stage of learning that is frequently misunderstood or mislabelled as misbehaviour by adults.

Stella illustrates how understanding schemas, like rotation or connection, helps educators and parents make sense of children's actions.

• Stella shares the example of Amari, whose interest in taking things apart was rooted in a schema around rotation and connection.
• "Everything our children do, they do for a reason. Your role, whether you're their mother or whether you're chief observer, is to try and work out what that is."

Partnerships with parents

Parents are identified as children's first and most important educators, and a two-way partnership between home and setting is essential. Educators should value parental observations as much as they do their own, rather than positioning themselves as the sole experts.

• The work at Pengreen around shared schema observations between parents and practitioners is cited as a strong model of this relationship.
• "Practice in a setting is only as good as the number of times that bridge is crossed in both ways by parents and practitioners."

Pausing, observing, and avoiding interference in play

A key professional skill is the ability to pause and observe before intervening in a child's play, described as being "outwardly passive, but inwardly active."

Educators are cautioned against stepping in too early, which can disrupt the child's own learning process.

• Stella recounts interfering in a child's aeroplane role-play by introducing prawn cocktail crisps, an element outside the child's firsthand experience, which disrupted the play.
• Julia advises: "When you see those moments, just pause, just wait and watch a little longer while you decide what the best thing to do is."

Play and the youngest children (0–3)

Care events and yes spaces are positioned as foundational to the play and development of infants and toddlers. Julia highlights that interference is especially common with very young children and that allowing struggle supports mastery, autonomy, and the dispositions for lifelong learning.

• Julia references Emmy Pickler's concept of yes spaces. These are a well-resourced, safe environment, where very young children can play freely without adult interference. The play space doesn't require permission or correction, so the child can feel safe with the opportunities to play provided
• "When a child has a fulfilling care event with a close, caring adult, it's like it fills them up with fuel to then go into their yes space to play freely and creatively."

Schoolification and protecting play

There is a shared concern about increasing top-down, outcomes-based pressures that downgrade play in favour of adult-led, curriculum-heavy approaches. Instead, we should provide a play-based curriculum and support children to set their own outcomes through natural curiosity.

Both Stella and Julia express worry that schoolification and not understanding the importance of play are compromising children's well-being and positive learning dispositions.

• Stella advocates that early childhood education should adopt pedagogy grounded in child development knowledge, referencing Birth to Five Matters as a valuable resource for educators.
• Julia notes: "The move to a much more top-down, outcomes-based, adult-led approach has compromised many of our principles, and I fear it is compromising the well-being and the positive learning dispositions of young children."