grumpysutcliffe

For a long time I feel I have been ambiguous about my own personal views of children’s play and play places. I feel now is the time for me to come clean. Nothing revolutionary or surprising, more, I hope a confirmation of what I have said publicly and privately over the past few years.

Primarily it will be a collection of my own observations about different places where we encourage, or would like to encourage children to play. I hope you will agree that it is holistic, equally embracing different opportunities, their benefits and problems, without being in any way a play fundamentalist.

After more than 30 years working in this sector and after Chairing the writing of the Playground Safety Guidelines in 1992 with Dave Renshaw at the National Children’s Play and Recreation Unit and then Managing Risk in Play provision with Tim Gill, Sandra Melville and the Play Safety Forum from 2000 to 2008, as well as participating in the writing of the European Standard between 1990 and 2000 and being involved in the Children’s Play Policy Forum from its inception, I feel the time has come for me to give my own very personal views about the different sorts of play that we offer children and the way in which I believe they should be complimentary.

What I would like to do is to go through each of the above forms of play provision and give my own views about them.

Broadly speaking they fall into several different categories:

• Adventure Playgrounds, sometimes referred to as open access play, ideally involving self build structures, loose parts and playworkers.
• Natural Play (as if all play were not natural) which involves a setting made up largely of Natural elements such as tree trunks, boulders, landscape, sand and water.
• Conventional Playgrounds in public spaces, which range from Kit, Fence and Carpet (or KFC, thank you Helen Woolley!) to imaginative places which can include natural elements as well.
• School Playgrounds again ranging typically from fitness trails to loose parts and, rarely, sand and water
• Public realm, in pedestrian streets and squares cheek by jowl with adult public usage such as cafes, shopping etc. Sadly currently this is rare, but I hope a growing tendency for play.

These are what I believe constitute the main stream and backbone of play provision, though there are others such as after school clubs, large Pay and Play parks and Play Barns, which range from supervised facilities, large and exciting outdoor play and inflatables to indoor soft play, but I will not be discussing these here.

What I would like to do is to go through each of the above forms of play provision and give my own views about them.

First, Adventure Playgrounds.

By which I mean supervised playgrounds that are generally open just as long as there are playworkers there to supervise them. They are very much self-created, with and without the children and parents that use them. To my knowledge, they usually have a register of regular participants, with volunteers to help, who are often the parents of children using the playground. Normally they comprise both an indoor play area with creative materials, loose parts (eg scrap materials and items that children can manipulate and play with) and seating areas and outdoor areas that usually have one or two large wooden structures created by playworkers, who have experience of building such items, with the help of children. Ideally the structures are supposed to be temporary and capable of modification by the children that use them, but in my experience they rarely get modified on a regular basis. The “Elements” form another important part of the Adventure Playground offering, comprising sand and water play and a fire pit. Generally speaking the materials used on Adventure playgrounds are “found” and ideally free of charge. They were a natural succession to the post war bomb sites that children loved and used as playgrounds immediately after the war.

I have one or two misgivings about adventure playgrounds. The first is that they rarely live up to the claims that are made for the movement. Children rarely actually make the structures on which the playgrounds are based, most structures lasting several generations of use (a generation being the time that children use these playgrounds, typically perhaps 7 years) without significant development. These structures are often a fulfilment of a playworkers dream place to play and as such are often brilliant, but they are not usually self built by children!

Secondly I have misgivings about the claims of “Playwork”, which seems to me to have an inherent contradiction. If play is defined as the activity of children that is freely chosen and intrinsically motivated (as set out in the Playwork Principles), why is there a need for playworkers to supervise and participate in their play activity? and should such activity be truly the only experience of play or even considered to be the best experience of play as is sometimes implied by the Playwork movement? I think that this is probably a weakness in this definition of play rather than invalidating the role of Playworkers. But I do think that such play offerings are limited and can only offer a partial solution to children’s play needs.

My final concern about Adventure Playgrounds is the logistical impossibility of their being universally available to all children. The numbers that would be required and the Playworkers required to staff them could only be the result of a complete change in this Government’s or indeed the last Government’s policy, not just to recognise the importance of play but seriously embrace only this specific aspect of it, even if it were to be agreed as the desirable outcome for children. The Capital cost of doing this would, I believe be in excess of a billion pounds and probably several billion and that is before the revenue implications.

So, having said all that, I do believe that Adventure playgrounds do offer one of the best experiences that a child can have in play. I do believe that the presence of adults within a child’s play environment adds a dimension to the play experience allowing a child a different sort of freedom to that which they enjoy when playing on their own, indeed the presence of adults is often a stated preference of children. In addition Adventure Playgrounds encourage a creative freedom, enabling greater risk within a social context than can be found elsewhere. To me the encouragement of greater self awareness and self potential is at the root of real education and fulfilment in later life, quite apart from the thrill of activity for its own sake. So I am an advocate, even a passionate advocate for adventure playgrounds but only as one element within the play offering that should be made to children.

My second is “Natural” Play.

One has to begin with the word “Natural”, which sort of sadly implies that any other play is “un-natural”, which is clearly not the case, nor is it the intention of most natural play advocates. However the meaning is indistinct and varies from encouraging children to engage with nature, through using only natural elements such as tree trunks and boulders, to inserting “natural” objects into a conventional playground. It has really suffered because it became a clichéd response to the Playbuilder programme before anyone had really worked out the implications on maintenance or a requirement for compliance with Standards. Thus we even reached a point where fibreglass boulders were being supplied in order to comply with Standards and at the same time meet the design expectations of Playbuilder programme. This programme has, sadly resulted in the “natural” elements now being removed from many playgrounds. The gestural insertion of so called “natural” elements into Playbuilder playgrounds to obtain Government funding seems to me to have been ignorant and cynical and has seriously set back the natural play movement.

To me it is so obvious that encouraging children to engage with nature is a wonderful thing. I only have to look out of my window in Swanage to watch children playing in the sand and waves on Swanage beach or letting children loose in wooded public landscapes for this to be apparent. Of course we should provide every opportunity for children to experience nature, to lose their fear of the unknown, insects, animals, remote places, but it may be impossible for cultural, geographical or economic reasons to make this offering to all children, nor would it be desirable, if we could, to limit their experience to this monoculture of play. And even if we could, we would have to embark on another massive piece of education both for the designers as well as the providers.

Third the Conventional Playground in the park.

I remember as a child enjoying the old Jungle Gym, as one who suffers from vertigo, the sense of satisfaction, from reaching the top, particularly when there was that extra tower in the centre. Sitting looking around and down at the world from above adults and children. I mention this because this would almost certainly be considered boring and unimaginative today and, as far as I know, is no longer offered for today’s modern playground.

The conventional playground in parks is perhaps the most controversial sort of playground within the non-commercial members of our sector. Sometimes there seems to me to be a reluctance by some within the play sector to buy commercially made play products at all! Not to find a “Natural” or “found” or “self made” alternative product is somehow an admission of failure for such people. In my view this is very sad. Conventional playgrounds are hugely varied from wonderful landscaped places including standard products, natural products, sand and water play, in fact almost every facet of play imaginable to really dreadful formulaic products with maximum activities for minimum money placed on a dead flat sea of rubber, set within a cage of fencing, with no reference to location, risk or creativity and everything in between!

I thought we made huge progress with the Playbuilder programme and the ten principles in Play England’s Design for Play publication, particularly the Golden Rule:

“a successful play space is a place in its own right, specially designed for its location, in such a way as to provide as much play value as possible”

In implementing that programme we made four steps forward, but sadly since the programme ended and we have a Government that denies the existence of play we have taken three steps back again. As I said in my last blog “Success of Government investment in Play” I do believe that we would have been better off being less coercive at that time and more persuasive, which might have resulted in our only taking three steps forward, but only one back!

Of course one of the strengths of this form of play is that it requires principally capital funding and very little revenue, but I think more important is what these playgrounds can potentially and quite often succeed in offering, making quite clear demarcation of areas specifically reserved for children within the general context of the park and offering stimulating and creative play for children at a far more geographically universal level.

Fourth School Playgrounds. Traditionally schools have recognised the need for play and play facilities within their playgrounds, although their understanding of the role of play within a child’s education is very mixed. Typically within a school playground the facilities offered are a trim trail around the perimeter, which seem to me singularly inappropriate to their needs at playtime or lunch break. At these times the playgrounds come under intense use, with upwards of 20 to 200 children playing simultaneously. Combined with this children need a full range of play experiences beyond simply that of a trim trail, which is both very specific in its offering and also limited in the numbers that can use it any one time.

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Recently a number of developments have really extended the way schools could, and in my opinion should, be using their playgrounds. Two of them are based on the principles of “loose parts”. The first, Scapstore Playpod is a brilliant scheme developed with the Scapstore movement, which combines the use of recycled scrap with a training scheme in Playwork for supervisory staff, the second Snug was conceived by Snug and Outdoor and developed by Sutcliffe Play also based on a loose parts concept. The third development OPAL is very much based around introducing schools to the concepts and ways in which play can enhance the education of young children, giving training in playwork and auditing facilities.

Interestingly all three of the above systems of play designed for schools have at their heart the importance of risk and the encouragement of children to manage the risks in their lives, but more of this later. Suffice it here to say that this, perhaps is one of the reasons why children return to the class room refreshed, invigorated and ready for more disciplined learning. It is also one of the reasons, why play should be at the heart of the school curriculum instead of in the margins.

So, to my final and Fifth, Public Realm.

This I feel is my baby and I am likely to become grumpy and ranting about it. Why is shopping, the most usual time for children to be with their parents, so interminably boring? The sound of children playing is a symptom of a healthy place and community, whereas a place that is silent (apart from the noise of cars!) is a community that is dying or dead (thanks to Brian Cheeseman for that one, but true!). Why are we not planning to bring children back into our streets, squares and public places? We invest hundreds of thousands of pounds to create safe places for bicycles in our streets, why are we not doing this for children’s play?

If all shopping streets were made into shared space with a maximum speed of 10mph imposed through chicanes, bumps, seats and sleeping children and you added places for socialising, sand pits, a water trickle (NOT the ubiquitous fountains at vast expense and monocultural return!) our communities would be transformed, security and social cohesion increased; just think of the passeggiata in Italy. Why do we not do it?

Actually there are examples few and far between, but they are even fewer than the wonderful playgrounds you occasionally find in parks!

Standards, risk, inclusivity. If my five categories of play were to be ordered successively in vertical columns one after the other as they might be in a matrix, then horizontally running through all of them would be the need to consider Standards, risk and inclusivity. The need for children to have the opportunity to take risks, embrace risk taking and learn how to manage risks I would like to think is no longer a matter for debate. However the appropriate way of doing this is still contentious.

Standards and risk. It is interesting to note that the European standard (and no Brexit here, we simply lose our right to a weighted vote or a final say) is really only applicable to conventional playgrounds. Adventure Playgrounds and school playgrounds are supervised and so specifically excluded from the remit of the CEN standard. Natural playgrounds by their very definition of being natural and not man modified must be outside the scope of the standard and public realm can hardly be considered as a playground, it is after all the entire public realm.

As you will all be aware by now, I am not trained in playwork and therefore only speak from a perspective of common sense, but it seems to me that at the root of all education must be the encouragement of children to take risks; physical, emotional and social. All creativity involves risk taking and all self-discovery and honesty depend on a person’s capacity to take risks.

Obviously there are elements of the Standard that are useful in considering some types of risk in the places where children are encouraged to play, but fundamentally they are all far better addressed through Risk Benefit Assessment (RBA) than the rigid application of standards.

Inclusivity. Like standards and risk this is something that should be considered for any playground, in whatever context. For designers familiar with this territory, it will be unconscious second nature, for others they will need to be reminded. In my view two things need to be remembered when thinking about inclusivity. First the aim should be to cater for all levels of physical ability from disabled to dexterous and well coordinated. Neither end of the spectrum should be omitted. And secondly all children need and enjoy risk and it may well be that the disadvantaged need and enjoy it more than the able bodied.

So, to my conclusions.

First I believe that play is fundamental to the wellbeing, development and enjoyment of children.

Second that the greater the variety of play experiences we can offer children the better.

Third that all the above types and circumstances of play for children should form part of the vocabulary of play.

Fourth that the opportunity to take and manage risk should be considered and included in all places where children play

Fifth Inclusivity should not be an optional extra, it should be second nature and embrace all levels of ability and not just the disabled.

But finally remember the Golden Rule:

 “a successful play space is a place in its own right, specially designed for its location, in such a way as to provide as much play value as possible” Genius Loci

Never let it be said that there were no benefits from first the lottery funding then the Play Builder and Pathfinder programme investment amounting in all to over £500 Million. Don’t let it even be said that the net benefit did not exceed the issues that arose through the process, speed and product of its realisation.

Last week I visited the only Pathfinder playground that was designed and produced by Sutcliffe Play with the local community and Cambridge District Council at Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. If ever there was an example of what we can do as part of the commercial sector when given the opportunity to be responsible for design and realisation in conjunction with the local community, this must be one of the best. I could name others such as Chatsworth

and Paulsgrove in Portsmouth.

There are others of which I would be equally proud, where we interpreted the concepts of other designers, such as Cutsyke

and Snug

But this is really about the playground at Wisbech. An open access playground that is opened at dawn and closed at dusk by a local resident. Including two purpose built barges for toilet and changing facilities and indoor play space, Seen here through a self modified structure:

and American Swing,

cable ways, self build modular structure, sand and water play and a fire pit

all set in a playful landscape. My only criticism is the requirement for a fence, for which I can see no reason, being set in a green with little traffic at its edges.

So why do I think that it has been so successful. There wasn’t a child on the playground when we visited in the morning during term time, but all the signs of heavy use were apparent, worn out turf, charcoal around the fire pit (locked in the absence of Supervision); worn paths; a sign saying no play session today due to lack of staff (tragic, but clearly hanging on in there!).

But what pleased me most were the signs of ownership and modification that were to be seen everywhere and the lack of vandalism (I don’t consider graffiti to be vandalism, any more than a broken bone is a serious Injury! I remember the obscene Graffiti that I painted on the ceiling of my adolescent attic).

The addition of a boat that someone had picked up from somewhere. Hidden dens, bike tracks on the mounds outside the entrance to the playground.

While I was there I questioned a young man walking his dog on the green. He lived locally he said, the playground was fantastically heavily used. Occasionally there were scuffles, to his knowledge, never serious or out of hand. It was viewed as a real asset by the community, melting pot of race, nationality and religion in a very deprived area of Cambridgeshire.

If ever there was a justification for the investment programme, this must surely be it. There were many problems of making such a huge investment in so short a period, coercion to meet design standards that were not understood, resulting in extraordinary results such as Plastic rocks in the name of natural play, along with attempts to make all natural features comply with standards instead of using Risk Benefit Analysis to consider and justify minor irregularities.

Tragically with the change in policy of the current Government many of the people who so successfully drove this programme are no longer in place and there has been a tendency for playground design to return to the default Kit, Fence and Carpet (KFC) that preceded this investment, natural play being the biggest casualty. Happily all is not lost and many providers do have a better understanding than they did before the investment programme and there some playgrounds being built now that would come up to the ten principles underlying the golden rule of Genius Loci

My dreams?

First that this Government would recognise the contribution that play makes to the wellbeing, health and development of children in playgrounds such as Wisbech, in schools and in nature.

Second that the criteria for designing and purchasing playgrounds were based more closely on the 10 principles put forward in the Play England Design guide, rather than the reductionist approach of cost play points.

Third that those companies with a real knowledge of design, landscape, place making and children’s play be given more opportunities to create imaginative places for children to play, before this country is either covered in KFCs or the ubiquitous programmed fountains!

• On March 31st my Mother Lois Smith died. This obituary was written by Charles Drazin, a fellow trustee of the Lindsay Anderson Foundation and friend of Lois through the last years of her life

O Lucky Woman! Lois Sutcliffe Smith 1919 – 2016

by Charles Drazin

 I first saw Lois Smith on stage at the Royal Court Theatre in November 1994. The occasion was a celebration of the life of the film and theatre director Lindsay Anderson, who had recently died. She was describing their long friendship. Going back to when they first met in the 1940s, she explained how she had persuaded Lindsay, who had just come down from Oxford, to make a film about her husband’s factory near Wakefield, even though he had no previous experience of film-making. She concluded a funny, touching tribute with an account of Lindsay’s last days, which he had spent in her house in France.

This first memory captures well the person I got to know over the next twenty years. Vital and charismatic, Lois was a natural performer. She told me once that she would have liked to have been an actress. One of the things that drew Lindsay and Lois together was a shared love of Hollywood musicals. I am certain that they both must have seen that Mickey Rooney movie, in which Mickey persuades the kids in his sleepy town to put on a show. ‘How about it, kids!? We’ll get every kid in this town on our side, and we’ll start right now. Whaddya say?’ This was Lois. She had an extraordinary knack for generating enthusiasm, for inspiring people on to great endeavours that they would never otherwise have achieved, whether it was a young Lindsay Anderson or many other people whose lives she enriched through her encouragement.

The daughter of a Bradford family doctor and Lay Methodist Minister, she was born Lois Osborn Martin on 9 August 1919, the youngest of four children by eleven years. Growing up during the Depression was an important formative experience. She watched her father go to lengths to help his often desperately poor patients in a time when only a strong sense of community compensated for widespread hardship.

She used to speak with great warmth of what had clearly been a very happy childhood. One story comes to mind now. Her father, who was the son of a Methodist minister, was about to give his first sermon at the local church. He had a slight stammer, and so was more than usually nervous. When he successfully completed the talk, he asked the congregation, ‘Shall we sing hymn number … ?’ to which his youngest daughter piped up, ‘Yes, Daddy, do let’s!’ I think the story offers a clue to Lois’s own lack of shilly-shallying. Definite, rarely tentative, she knew how to seize the moment.

Two of her siblings, Bob and Esther, followed their father into the medical profession, and Lois herself, after school at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, went up to St Andrew’s University to read medicine, but dropped out after only a year. Whatever the huge admiration and affection she had for her family, it must have been difficult to try to follow in their footsteps when she herself had a creative vocation. This was an area in which they could not help her.

Returning home to Bradford to live with her parents, she became involved in a local arts and film society, and met Desmond Sutcliffe, who had taken over responsibility for managing a large family firm, Richard Sutcliffe Ltd, which, situated in Horbury outside Wakefield, invented and made underground belt conveyors for the mining industry. After a quick romance, the two married in 1939 and had two children, Perry Ann in 1941 and Robin in 1943.

Outgoing and gregarious, Lois was not of a disposition to settle down easily to housewifely domesticity. She was really only content when there was some cause or campaign to pursue.  A suitable opportunity arrived when, in 1947, Desmond commissioned a film company in London to write a treatment for a promotional film to be shown the following year at an industrial exhibition in Earls Court. Rather than accept a pedestrian outline that failed to capture the atmosphere of a Northern factory, Lois said, ‘Why not make a film ourselves? We could form a Sutcliffe Film Unit, and I know the person who could make it.’

This Rooney moment finally worked only because Desmond agreed to support what most other Managing Directors would have dismissed as a silly idea. His act of faith was important not only because it resulted in Lindsay Anderson’s first film, Meet the Pioneers, but also because it established the vital artistic framework within which Lindsay, and such other like-minded film-makers of his generation as Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz, would operate, championing the individual over the professional. When a few years later Lindsay wrote the manifesto for the Free Cinema Movement that led to such films as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey and This Sporting Life – documenting the North that Lois knew so well – the words offered a codification of what he had already experienced making his first film with Lois and Desmond: ‘No film can be too personal. An attitude means a style. A style means an attitude …’

It’s worth quoting Lindsay’s own summary of how his first film began because it brings out so well Lois’s character: ‘She marched in and said that she wanted me to make a film of the works. I told her not to be so damned ridiculous… I was just down from Oxford and was packing my bag to do a post-graduate course, with the vague idea of becoming a teacher. Lois said that was nonsense and that I’d never make a teacher. She said I must make this film… None of us knew a thing about making films. We were all amateurs. When Lois makes up her mind about something, there’s not much you can do about it.’

Lois as continuity Girl 1948

Lois went on to collaborate with Lindsay on his next film about Richard Sutcliffe Ltd, which was called Idlers at Work, but her involvement with the Sutcliffe Film Unit ended abruptly in March 1950 when Desmond died of cancer at the age of only 35. Regarded with disapproval by the members of the Sutcliffe family who took over the factory, Lois left Wakefield with her two young children and took refuge with her parents in Bradford.

At the same time she continued to rent the house in the village of Appletreewick in the Yorkshire Dales, which she and Desmond had enjoyed in the last years of his life.

Here she gathered around herself a group of friends in what to seems to have been a kind of Northern salon: her nephew David Waterhouse recalled the exhilaration of being exposed to a world of music, art, argument and jazz. He remembered the first summer after Desmond’s death, when typical of the mix was a post-impressionist Hungarian painter, Jean Georges Simon, known as ‘Jansci’, who was staying, whilst carving the headstone for Desmond’s grave in a tent at the bottom of the garden. Lois had discovered his work with Desmond at a Wakefield art gallery, and had commissioned him to carve a headstone for the grave in Burnsall churchyard.

This wish to pay tribute to people who had mattered in her life was striking. When Jansci himself died many years later, Lois set up a trust to promote his work. The unfailing efforts that followed included several exhibitions of his pictures and a book that was published in 2005. Similarly, it was Lois’s initiative that established the Lindsay Anderson Memorial Foundation, which aimed to foster the non-conformist, socially committed spirit that Lindsay represented.

It was while living in Appletreewick that Lois met and eventually married Mickey Smith, with whom she had a son, Stephen, in 1962. The nature of Mickey’s work as a topographical surveyor meant that over the next thirty years they lived in many different places around the country, including Bristol, London, Saffron Walden and Cornwall. Such a peripatetic life must have caused inevitable family disruption, but it suited the restless nature of someone who found contentment only in an active engagement with the world around her.

In Bristol Lois trained to become a social worker. If it was yet another example of how she actively transformed the lives of other people, at the same she was determined to develop her own creative vocation. In 1990 she went to Batley School of Art, and became an accomplished painter. It was a vocation that she pursued with passion and purpose into her last years, refusing to allow her increasingly poor eyesight to stop her.

Another passion was France. On her sitting-room wall there was a bright, colourful poster of three people dancing the sardana during the fête du Racou, a small Catalan village east of  Collioure that she first visited in 1952 with her children and her friend Eunice Musk[surname?]. The original intention had been to spend a few days in Brittany, but after a week of solid rain, Lois decided to follow the advice of a petrol pump attendant who said that if they really wanted to find the sun, then they should retrace their steps, turn right and drive until they got to the sea. After that first visit, Lois returned to the south of France many times, eventually, in the 1980s, buying a farmhouse in the Périgord.

Free spirit that she was perhaps it was inevitable that she could also be often selfish, capricious and volatile. Her children were fortunate that they could turn to their Aunt Esther, who offered a much needed compensation for her younger sister’s erratic nature. The two remained close through their lives in a mutually beneficial relationship for their children, Esther often having to act as the surrogate mother for Perry, Robin and Stephen, while Lois provided her nephews David, Robert and John with a taste of excitement.

If Lois knew how to make the most of life, she faced much sadness too, whether it was Desmond’s early death, problems of mental instability within the family or her divorce from Mickey in 1984 after years of coping with his alcoholism. But whatever the hardships, a rare resilience and capacity for friendship carried her through. When her family and friends gathered together after her funeral, there were so many wonderful stories about her that it seemed much more natural to celebrate her life than mourn her parting.

One of her friends described visiting Lois in hospital not long before she died. She had expected to find her fading away on her deathbed, but instead she was her old, irrepressible, funny self. ‘It was if she had grabbed the Grim Reaper by the hand and taken him down the pub for a drink.’ Another friend shared the message that Lois had left on her answerphone not so long afterwards: ‘Lois here, . . .  back from the brink… . ! 2, 4, 6, 8, who do we appreciate? Me!!! Cackle’ The comment might have been meant in jest, but it was true. Rarely can anyone have been so appreciated.

When Lindsay died, Lois wrote a long, sensitive account of his last days, which she concluded by quoting two poems. The first, ‘Dirge without Music’, by Edna St Vincent Millay, began, ‘I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground… / With lilies and laurel they go; but I am not resigned.’ And the second, ‘Alone’ by Siegfried Sassoon, ended, ‘Alone … the word is life endured and known. / It is the stillness where our spirits walk / And all but inmost faith is overthrown.’ I think that to be alone was what Lois feared most, but her loving heart and provocative wit were such that she was never alone for long, and will never be forgotten now by those who were lucky enough to have known her.

The accountability and transparency of the Children’s Play Policy Forum (CPPF) and the Play Safety Forum (PSF) have been a matter of concern since their inception back in 1997 with the advent of the four Play Contracts initiated by the then Conservative administration.

Initially the membership and structure of the two fora were in the gift of the Contract holders, who, at that time was the National Playing Fields Association (NPFA) (now Fields in Trust), who simply invited those people or organisations that they felt could contribute to the issues around play and communication with Government at that time. When the contracts were passed to the Children’s Play Council criteria for membership was reviewed and Terms of reference were set up.

The fact that recently there has been growing concern about their accountability and transparency is welcome as it perhaps indicates that the two fora are perceived as having been increasingly influential and effective, but which has probably been truer for the PSF than the CPPF. However, regardless of the reason, this is an important issue and one that both fora take seriously.

Maybe the beginning of a new year would be good time to put on record what has been done in the past year to try and respond to this concern; timely too because the sector has been so reduced and transformed as a result of the drastic cuts to local authority and voluntary and community sector play provision. It also appears that the UK Government is more likely to be influenced the third and private sectors rather than democratically elected local authorities. All this only increases the importance of transparency and accountability.

During the past year the most valuable thing that these two fora have done with regard to transparency has been to create their own websites, independent of any host and entirely in their own right. Given that we have no staff or resources, it is a tribute to the four national lead agencies in the play sector – Play England, Play Wales, Play Scotland and PlayBoard Northern Ireland – and particularly to Play Wales that these have been created. The websites in each case give the aims and objectives of each of the Forum, the criteria for membership, the current members and in the case of the Children’s Play Policy Forum the term of office and process for appointment of the Chair, which is currently also being established for the Play Safety Forum.

The membership of each forum is reviewed and discussed often and new members are considered regularly by the existing members. Both fora are open to suggestions of new members and will consider these at meetings. However, the fora do not consider themselves to be formally accountable to any wider membership or constituency, nor is there a wish to be so.

However it is relevant to note that, since Play England has become an independent charity, the four Nations are all now membership organisations and in this respect all four organisations are accountable to their respective membership and elected trustees. In addition the work of the fora is open to all the members of the organisations that participate and on completion is publicised as far as resources allow.

This informality is partly a matter of practicality, but also due to a wish to complement rather than compete with the four national play agencies, who are all active members of both fora, and who each have clear structures for governance and wider accountability. At times this has enabled conversations with officials and politicians that might have not otherwise taken place and compliments the more formal role of the 4 national orgs.

Personally I am extremely proud of the work that has been done by the PSF since I became Chairman in 2002 and believe that attitudes to risk have developed considerably over that period. Indeed I believe that the UK now leads the world in this field!

With regard to the CPPF I am sad that we have been unable to engage with the current administration in any meaningful sense, what has been achieved is much greater coherence between the Nations and greater resilience in what seems to be a hostile political environment. It is tragic that the UK Government has failed to recognise the contribution that children’s play could and should be making to the health, wellbeing and happiness of all children, and it is a cause to which both the CPPF and PSF will remain unfailingly determined!