THE LITTLE THINGS
In the current global situation we now find ourselves in, with all its financial and social turmoil, and all its erosion of ‘normal’, I’ve increasingly begun to focus on the little things for solace.
Although The Unknown has arrived liked an all-consuming ocean, exposing our vulnerabilities and some of our biggest fears, the little things are going to be the reminders, the remnants of joy and hope that lie along the way, wherever this path eventually leads us to.
So, I’m going to look for them in the light between trees and the wind in their branches, in lengthening shadows, in the emerging Spring flowers, in the cathedral of birdsong and the high-overhead cloudscapes, in my children’s voices and their laughter, in the sunrise and the sound of my little dog’s feet on the woodland carpet of dry leaves.
At the heart of all my work with Can I Go And Play Now? there have been three principles for childhood: faith, hope and love. These remain unaltered, in fact they are strengthened and my resolve for all three to authentically come to life is now deepened.
Wherever you are in the world, I trust you are staying safe. Our children need us more than ever. And maybe everything they need from us lies in the little things too ✊🏻🧡
Be safe, stay home and keep playing hard and as hard as you can x


F U N N E L V I S I O N
“And I wasn't worried at all / Sneaking through the back door / No, I wasn't worried at all / Dreams are what you live for...” Tears, The Chameleons
I keep coming back to this diagram from ‘The Green and Black Books’ as I believe it sums up the simple choice we can make within our children’s educational experience.
Childhood has such richness and so many possibilities within its world of magic that when we step into it, when we immerse ourselves into its infinite potential then we have the opportunity to add to children’s sense of self whilst at the same time sprinkling skills over the top of them.
It’s why I’ve become a such a strong advocate of co-playing, the idea that we go on an adventure with children into play, with each point of direct teaching being like a ‘base camp’ of drawing breath, introducing skills for the next leg of the adventure before setting off once more into the magic and mystery of children’s choices and how they see the world.
Learning does not have to be separated from childhood. It is integral, as though both hold hands, fingers interlinked. It’s down then to the choice we make to either hold childhood’s other hand and walk or break the hold and lead children away from their natural programme towards the single vision path of agenda and control - I guess it depends on which way round we see the funnel...

LETTING LIGHT IN
Sitting in my hotel room, I couldn’t help but think how several conditions need to exist in schools and settings if children are to have an experience that it authentically rich with their own imaginations and ‘storytelling’:
• A leadership team that has faith in teachers and children
• A leadership team that understands that interactions and genuine bonds do not require mountains of evidence and observations
• Educators who see that simplicity is key especially in planning and paperwork
• A learning landscape that is open ended and offers children possibilities to follow their own pathways
• A simple rhythm to the day based around the Golden Blend of ‘tight teach’ and ‘open play’
• Children knowing that they are authentically valued and accepted, and that the adults are there to guide and support, not control and ‘get them to do learning’
• A team that has rich dialogue and knows their children, not for Ofsted or any other watchdog, but because they genuinely want to know them
• Children’s next steps are explored and skills are central to practice, rather than timetable or topic
There are others I know, and I’d love to hear your own thoughts. I have a unique opportunity to speak at a Headteacher conference this Thursday to outline what they should be looking for in excellent nursery and Reception practice. Feel free to chip in on the comments below and add to my voice - I intend to highlight childhood as being critical!
Ultimately I guess, it’s about being open to letting the light in, being open to the magic and mystery of children and all its wonderful possibility. And yes, it’s absolutely about love...


S O N G B I R D S
“I've been chasing another horizon / That's the place I can't forget...” On and On, Sea & Cake
The concept of childhood as being like a fragile bird is something that I keep returning to. It’s something that I explore in ‘School and the Magic of Children’ and increasingly I’m seeing that children aren’t the only people full of birdsong. Educators and parents are too, yet often their song is replaced by expectation, demand and the day-to-day, life being funnelled into tighter and tighter circles. In an educational context, we absolutely need teachers to be full of birdsong, creative and joyful with an ability to listen to the echoed song of childhood...
Having read the proposed revised ELGs for the English curriculum, I can’t help think that the Adult World missed the opportunity to show children how they are valued.
Instead it would appear that measurability and accountability got its way and is creating a curriculum of knowledge and whole-schoolism. It’s going to take a real birdsong to emerge and here’s hoping that play isn’t going to get squeezed even more.
Play can still have a life and if you can hear the birdsong within you, let’s continue to advocate childhood and the song of children as widely and loudly as we can... 🧡

​S I M P L I C I T Y
“Help me / Find my way from this maze / I can't help myself...” Living In Another World, Talk Talk
There’s a mythology about paperwork and ‘spreadsheetism’ that suggests the more the Adult World scrutinises, and the more it analyses and delves, the more likely it is that children and teachers will ‘perform’ better.
This leads to layers of added complexity, a veneer that focuses educators on outcomes and curriculum delivery rather than skills and childhood. It creates the conditions in which play begins to be steadily eroded, to be replaced by ‘work’ and product.
All too often the Adult World scrutinises play and admonishes it in spite of all its rich potential and its ability to be a dynamic learning process, because the Adult World believes it lacks apparent clarity.
Yet, in the same breath, the Adult World is more than happy to see the shallow ‘clarity’ of holding activities, pre-fixed challenges, page after page of ticked number sentences, children lining up for teacher approval, teaching assistants working with the same children day in day out, worksheets and ‘Golden Time as a reward for good work’ further up its a school ladder.
It does so, because it will always approve of what it already understands. Play makes the Adult World feel vulnerable and uncomfortable, because play lies outside of its scope of understanding, because play has its own vitality, because it is not the ‘control’ passed on from the ghosts of the past.
The Adult World wants children to be busy with production, with assumed and imposed purpose, with output. And to achieve this, it demands planning and topics and timetable and data and monitoring and evidence, but only the evidence that it understands, not the evidence from the simplicity of play or from the dreamscape of children.
And when it can’t ‘see’ what it wants, the Adult World demands the ‘what-are-you-going-to-do-ness’ of interventions and challenge cards and learning intentions, yet further removing children from the centre of their learning and putting them to the side of it.
The complexity of the Adult World jars against the programme of play, its simplicity and, at the same time, its mystery. It demands children to ‘know’ yet closes its own eyes to the ‘unknown’....
The Adult World attempts to bring order to the ‘chaos’ of play. Yet play IS order. It is the Natural Order itself. And so in its attempt to superimpose order over children, the Adult World unwittingly throws children into chaos. It goes up against the ‘flow’, the stream of childhood. And then, in the landscape of disarray, it brings more interventions, more impositions, more ‘listening to children read’, more stasis...
It’s this repetitive cycle, round and round, Adult World order vs Childhood order that erodes the magic of children. It’s why we need to keep advocating play, keep reminding others of just why it is so critical that children experience adventure and head towards the simplicity and away from the ‘magnet’ of over-complexity.
Simplicity is out there and it’s increasingly time to discover it...

Thinking back on my teaching career, I've been reflecting on my interactions with parents, how I created positive relationships with them and how I 'sold' them the idea that co-play was the best thing for their child. Many parents ruefully said that they wished their experience of school had been that way, some even said that they'd gladly go back to school if it could be based on the principles that they saw their children so richly benefitting from, and a small number even volunteered their spare time to come and in and play and chat within the setting.

I talk about the importance of parents in my first book 'Can I Go And Play Now?' because I'm convinced that they are the people who have most potential to change educational practice. What the Adult World has skilfully done, especially in England, is transform education into a consumer marketplace. It created the idea that children were products and that schools were accountable for the product that came out of it and could therefore be graded against one another.

It built a story that children were also accountable within the structures of schools, accountable to behave and conform and become the product that schools could then claim to have got to a certain level, percentages, progress, monitoring, scrutinies, rigour, action plans, strategies all pouring into a model that now has CEOs and school business managers in abundance, with corporate companies waiting in the wings with test papers, reading books, maths schemes, all of them playing on the fear that education finds itself in... Fear of falling behind, of judgement, of visits, of takeover...

Yes, there are many great schools out there and many, many hardworking teachers under immense pressure who are achieving fantastic things, but there is a greater proportion that have been swept into the meta-narrative of child-as-product... When this happens we discover that children have had their childhood pushed to one side. We end up with adults teaching phonics so that children can pass a test, so that children can progress through book band colours, instead of focusing on the joyful gift that reading and writing can be, teaching mathematics in blocks because teaching schemes tell us to rather than focusing on the children's unique mathematical understanding.

None of this is a criticism of teachers, most have to do as they are told. What results however is both teacher and children are alienated from their true selves. Neither are robots after all. Most teachers enter the profession because they are creative and interested in children - how they leave on the other side is probably summarised in the teacher Facebook groups discussing burn out, workload, overwhelming expectations etc....

Can the tide be turned? I would argue it can. I only need point to Scotland, Wales and New Zealand as nations who have woken up to the price children have paid for far too long: the price of an eroded childhood. The concept of childhood is something that needs real exploration within our schools. ‘Play’ is possibly too easy to dismiss, but I believe that childhood is less so. When does childhood end and what defines it? I would say at 18 and that its definition lies within creativity, confidence, active learning, collaboration, curiosity, independence and choice. These are just some of the key components of childhood and you may want to comment on others.

So it therefore begs the question what are our schools doing with it? Are they immersing children in childhood or are they eroding it? Does a school value childhood? If so, how? It's one reason why I speak less about 'Early Years' or use the hashtag, because I believe it allows the Adult World to shrug its shoulders and turn its back on it - it belittles it "Well that's Early Years..." it says whilst leaning a heavy finger on the photocopier spewing out worksheet upon worksheet and creating ways that 4 year olds can be absorbed in the drudgery of wholeschoolism.

Yet, is it easy to dismiss 'childhood'? I don’t believe it is. If you don't value childhood, I'd want to know why the Adult World is in education. I can understand that the Adult World doesn't understand play. I get it. It has forgotten to remember, It can't make it fit neatly into its systems so instead comes up with ways of fitting children into the systems. But what about childhood? How does it value it?

And it's this question that i believe we need to put in the hands of our parents. Thinking back, my parents at school were very concerned if their child’s lunch box was missing, or they had the wrong jumper or bag of wet clothes, or their jumper had paint on, or they hadn't drunk out of their drinks bottle.

They very rarely complained about ‘missing childhood’ because they could see that skills were flowing through our practice and they were filled with the one thing that disappears if childhood is let go of: joy.

Yet, in schools and settings that erode childhood, do those parents notice? Is it within their prism of attention? Arguably not because they haven’t been woken up to looking for joy and childhood, to demanding it...

So if parents are quick to spot the missing things at the end of the day, might they be equally as active if they were made more aware of childhood? Where at the end of each day, they look to see that childhood remains strong and intact and in that book bag along with the next reading book and secret messages and junk model robots there's also creativity, confidence, curiosity, collaboration and choice in there too.

The Adult World created a marketplace. It created the ideas of Outstanding Schools and league tables and systems and reports and school values pinned up in lobbies and on websites. It made a culture of conformity, of curriculum-ism and it has done so at a heavy price.

So if this market exists, then let's use it. Maybe it's now time to bring a new product to it. Maybe it's time to present 'childhood' as the New Improved object to desire. Maybe that's what needs to be advertised. Maybe that the question that parents need to ask of schools: "what are you doing with my child's childhood...?" Maybe this pear-shaped hill that the Adult World created can be altered? After all, children only have one childhood and once it's gone it's gone,..

"A thought that never changes / Remains a stupid lie / It's never been quite the same..."
Your Silent Face, New Order

Across 2019, it has been a very real privilege to spend time in settings and schools helping to support practice and grow the conditions for play to thrive. So many educators want children to experience joy and wonder across their day, and it's been encouraging to see this happen with practitioners who are eager to enable choice, creativity and collaboration. In nurseries and preschools, there seems to be a strong desire for play to flourish, and it has been a blessing to have time in these settings, connecting with the magic of children and its infinite possibilities.

Play and freedom to explore is critical in our pre-school early years settings, simply because the echoes of play need to follow children into school, and do so like a happy twin through their educational journey. If play isn't alive in our pre-schools, then it becomes a lost word: parents aren't opened up to seeing just how important it is, and then don't expect it within their child's school experience. When this happens, when play is stifled, the Adult World is in danger of creating 'play deficit' - a very real and damaging experience for children. Play deficit pushes children to ‘the side of their own lives’ and denies them the ability to follow their own learning adventure.

 S E L F  D I S P O S A L
“You're falling against the world again...”
Hold on, Roosevelt
It’s probably the hardest thing to do as an educator: letting go. Relinquishing control and enabling children to find space for themselves. The Adult World is dominated in its education systems with behaviour management and timetables and groupings and lesson planning and one great big preconception that children need to be ‘taught a lesson’.

So, it can be incredibly challenging to find the faith to let go, to accept that children don’t always need adults, that they are capable of being without intention.

When the Adult World begins to realise this, not only does it liberate children, it liberates itself: what we try to control, controls us. We lose patience and become afraid when children don’t do what they’re told or reinterpret the lovely continuous provision that we have painstakingly set up.
​
By letting go of children, we let go of ourselves and the moment we do that is the moment we awaken from the sleepwalk of the past, the ‘what-has-always-been-done’ and we enter a new freedom that, through play, can take us anywhere...

S H I P B U I L D I N G
“Closed minds don’t open doors...”
Addicted, Night Cafe
It’s all about joy: the joy of connection, the joy of discovery, the joy of belonging and the joy of being alive in the moment...

The abandonment of time, the openness to possibilities, the delight in being protagonist not antagonist, the surrender of oneself to what-might-happen-ness not what-will-happen-ness, and the discovery of purpose and meaning for itself are all deeply embedded in play.

Play isn’t frivolous. It has a current under the surface that breaks out in a child’s face, in the way they run, the way they rush to collaborate and support one another, it’s a look in their eyes that tells you that they have been ‘seen’. Play is the child...

This seeing-ness can only happen when we ourselves interact with love and hope, when we demonstrate that we value children for who they are in the Now.

When we look through the lens of love, we see children for who they truly are: competent, deserving and capable - play reveals the true colours of a child, colours which refract outwards like October-pale sunlight through jamjar water on a windowsill...

K E R B I E . . .

“You could have done anything, if you wanted /
And all your friends and family think that you're lucky / But the side of you they'll never see /
Is when you're left alone with your memories /
That hold your life together, like glue...”
This Is The Day, The The

Kerbie was simple. That was its beauty. To stand on one side of the road in the Summer heat of an East Midlands housing estate flanked by replica houses that sat squatly in the sun, a gang of us throwing balls to rebound from the opposite kerb.

We’d play it for hours - no points, no competition, children of all ages, a disparate group, standing at various distances that were negotiated and accepted dependent on skill and age, almost as wordless as the Sun above.

And we played it with no awareness of time because time just slipped away into a long forgetfulness of jokes and play-teasing and encouragement and laughter - it was like we became the game, life took on a new meaning in each moment of success or not-quite. Different balls appeared with each new child, rules evolved with every throw and we were timeless like little Zen masters in our own Present with no past or future plan, just laughing comrades and a kerb...

And this is the essence of play itself: togetherness, negotiation, solidarity and the word-warmth of joy.
It’s the essence that we can strive to echo in our pedagogy: giving children space to explore and collaborate. We may not have Kerbie in our setting but we do have children who are capable of living in its spirit. It just needs faith...

👧🏼not🤖

“There you were / Driving miles through an open land / Escaping thoughts...” If There’s A Light On, City Calm Down

Plan for identity. Plan for freedom. Plan for a landscape that sings with opportunity and possibilities. The less we control, the more children come to a sense of their capabilities.
Provision is at its most effective when it offers adventure, not a linear journey. The landscape we create for children can offer the anything-ness of learning. It can be ‘full with emptiness’, open to interpretation, to the subtlety of play with all its rich collaboration and creativity.

When our landscapes are an invitation, then children immerse themselves and they hand us an invitation in return: to join in with the dance that is play and to release ourselves from the past and enter the present. Because that is the potential that play has for us: Now-ness, the Dreamtime in which we discover as much about children as we do about ourselves.

If our children’s days are to be the Great Adventure that they deserve and need, then the simplicity of not-setting-up-ness is key. Play is the Unknown to step into with faith. When adults resist their Ego then they awaken to the Psyche of children, and then the adventure can truly begin... 👧🏼not🤖

“Tell me, is everything unplanned?
It’s all so unexpected that I just can't understand...”
One Day, The Church

If we say that children need freedom to explore and to investigate in order to discover the world and their place within it for themselves, then the learning landscape we offer them needs to become less tied to planned outcomes and more open to all possibility, to the Unexpected.

We cannot necessarily know how children will interpret the spaces in our setting if we agree they are capable and creative, neither can we control the collaborations that will unfold within them.

Our continuous provision needs to become less intentional, less restricted by what we want to see and instead, increasingly shaped by what we m i g h t see. When we let go of provision in this way, we turn it into a gift.

What we do plan for are the resources and equipment which children will choose from based on our understanding of how these can move their development forward and our own interactions within the space - in this way, we flip planning on its head and plan for ourselves, not the children. When we plan with the 3Ms in mind, we are re-imagining our role as educators and instead, emerge as co-constructors of meaning and experience not the controllers of them. We lose our intentions and replace them with intrigue: we take that step into the Unknown - and that is when the magic truly begins to happen...

👧🏼not🤖

"I sat on the roof / And watched the day go by..." Wishful Thinking, China Crisis

The Adult World seems to live in a state of constant demand. More this, more that, reply now, get to here, get to there, do this, do that, finish it, start it, watch this, watch that, an endless series of over-stimulation and under-pressure-ness. It rarely seems to have time to stop at think and just BE. We wait for a fortnight in the sun or weekending-ness so that we can step off the merry-go-round and find ourselves some breathing space before it all begins once more.

The same might be said of our children. Over-scheduled, this thing, that thing, got to get here, got to get there, all adding to their restless-legged-ness and the self-doubt that parents feel, especially over the Summer holidays, about how they might occupy time and keep children busy - am I enough? Am I parenting right? Am I fulfilling the culturally defined role of 'parent'? 

It happens in our schools too. The Adult World demands that children are in a state of Doing, achieving targets, making rapid progress, closing the gap, It wants 'learning' to be visible so that teachers and children can be made accountable. So educators feel a similar self-doubt - am I providing challenge? Am I interacting sufficiently? Am I moving learning forward? Am I enough?

Yet children need to learn the Art of Boredom. They need to develop their own ways of planning and considering and wondering. They need the emptiness of time. They need space to think, to dwell, to play with ideas before acting. It is the child's way of weighing up and coming into a moment of self-awareness and self-realisation. "I am in a quiet state. I am awake to myself, I am me. I choose"

If we consistently move children from one place to next then we erode their innate ability to decide for themselves, to shape their own responses to the world. Through choice they exercise autonomy -in the moment of choosing they are making a conscious shape of ourselves - choice is identity.

The world doesn't have to be all rush and push. There is great value in solitude and pensiveness.  Down time is the precursor to choice: "I could do this or that...I choose this" - there is responsibility, a growing sense of personal cause and effect, a route through which imagination can flourish and the possibility that children might decide to take risk because they can. Boredom gives way to creativity. It offers the chance for children to be protagonists in their own learning. It can lead to the solidarity or the individuation of learning - it is the evolution of the possible...

If only we weren't too quick to step in to get children 'busy'. If only we could take those moments before we intervene to look and listen, to wait for a child to unfold before us. The reality is that not all learning is visible, not all learning is open-book - there is a hidden world, a world of inertia and inaction, of slowly bringing into being through thought. Children are veiled in mystery. It is our responsibility to delve into it, to share in it. When we embrace boredom and passivity, we value the whole child. We give space for identity. 

So, perhaps it's time to re-imagine the insistence of 'demand' and to recognise that in the moment of choosing children are making an unconscious shape of themselves. A child's plan is their route towards self-construction after all. We just need to demand more of ourselves perhaps: to look through eyes that look beyond the visible and see the possibilities that take shape when children have time to choose...