Play offers children the opportunity to try out new ways of relating to the physical and social world. Through a range of encounters they can develop their imagination and skills, without incurring the material consequences of similar activities enacted ‘for real’. It is an essential and often joyful part of child development, and glum is the adult who does not retain some playfulness. It is a laboratory where children can develop different strategies to cope with the practical tasks of daily living and integrate themselves into a social network. Aberrant patterns of play may indicate a variety of difficulties and disorders in development, and may often provide important clues as to the problem. For example, a gross lack of imagination and rigid stereotyped play are found in children with autism; violent play with underdeveloped elaboration of emotional states is characteristic of children with conduct problems; repeated re-enactment of a single disturbing scene may be seen in children with post-traumatic stress disorder; and a disturbed pattern of emotional relationships is often exhibited in the doll play of children with attachment problems. As well as providing clues to the nature of a child's difficulties, play often offers an opportunity to engage with the child, and can provide a main avenue for therapeutic work, particularly with younger children who are not adept at talking about emotions and relationships.

In this and subsequent issues, we shall be publishing a number of commissioned reviews exploring children's play from a number of perspectives. Anthony Pellegrini and Peter Smith start us off with a review of the development of play and its forms and functions. As well as covering the structure of play including fantasy and pretend elements, the authors go on to consider its benefits for the child, and include a rather novel approach of attempting a cost-benefit analysis. Then Peter Blatchford reviews the state of play in schools. Here the importance of a time for the child to develop peer relationships and friendships away from the watchful gaze of adults is stressed, not only from a theoretical viewpoint, but from the practical standpoint of how much supervision should be given in the playground. In future numbers of the Review, we will publish an anthropological perspective by Allison James, a child psychotherapist's view by Anne Alvarez and Asha Phillips, and a review of the importance of drama in play and therapy by Peter Slade. At all times we would welcome your reactions, agreements, and disagreements, plus comments on what you think has been left out. Please do write to the Review office.

In this review we consider the nature and possible developmental functions of three forms of play: pretend, social, and locomotor. Play is defined in terms of dispositional and contextual criteria. First, the frequency of occurrence of each form of play across the period of childhood is documented. Developmental function of play is conceptualised in terms of immediate or deferred beneficial consequences. Four strategies for examining developmental function are reviewed: arguments from design, correlational analyses, experimental enrichment and deprivation, and cost-benefit analyses. Whereas most theories of play implicitly assume that during childhood it occurs frequently and has benefits deferred until adulthood, we suggest that some benefits of play are immediate.

This paper concentrates on children's play during school breaktimes. Though neglected by researchers, it is one of the few occasions when children can play and interact in a relatively safe environment, free of adult control. The paper reports on a recent programme of research at the University of London Institute of Education. There are signs that the prevalence of a negative view about breaktime in schools is leading to more deliberate management and supervision of breaktimes, and a reduction in duration. Breaktime can be a time when aggression, teasing, and bullying take place, but this paper also reviews positive aspects of peer relations and games at breaktime, including opportunities for friendship development, social competence, and peer culture. An important challenge facing schools is achieving a balance between control over pupil behaviour, while facilitating pupil independence and social development.

Non-attendance for first outpatient appointments at Child Mental Health Clinics is a common problem affecting efficient use of resources, as well as staff morale. This study demonstrates that requiring families to confirm that they want an appointment, in order to receive one, significantly improves the attendance rate for first appointments, compared to two other commonly used procedures: a reminder letter before the appointment is sent, and a standard appointment letter. Furthermore, this procedure did not appear to reduce accessibility to the service.

This review examines some of the definitional issues of attention and the related constructs of working memory and executive control. Measurement approaches to two attention elements, inattention and impulsivity, which are relevant to the diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, are also explored. Features of Stroop and Stroop-like tasks, continuous performance tests, and assessment paradigms that have a volitional or motivational aspect, such as delay of gratification, are highlighted. The conclusions emphasise the multidimensional nature of attentional constructs and the care that must be taken when attempting to measure a single attentional element.

The editor of Points of Law welcomes articles on topics related to the legal context of work related to child mental health, news about recent legal developments (new laws, official codes of practice, important judicial decisions), commentaries on these, and suggestions of topics for coverage in future issues.

At her suggestion, I arranged to meet Anula in the late afternoon, in a pub above John Menzies at Euston Station. As she moved gently towards my table, scholarly-looking and draped in her sari, making her way between chrome furniture, pints of lager, and urgent football and shopping chat, she seemed a character from one of those novels about the Raj, recently displaced from an ancient civilisation to a crass, modern world.