Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Who’s who
- About the author
- Preface
- Foreword
- Prologue
- Introduction ‘To respect, protect and fulfil’
- one ‘To play and to dream’ • Restoring play to the heart of the campaign for children’s rights
- two ‘For a change’ • Finding the evidence for play policy
- three ‘Advocates for play’ • Playwork’s place at the heart of the play movement
- four ‘New opportunities’ • Lottery funding and the beginnings of public play policy
- five ‘A vital and vibrant city’ • How devolved government in London set a benchmark for play policy
- six ‘Making the case’ • The call for a national play strategy
- seven ‘Things to do, places to go?’ • How play was overlooked by children’s services reform
- eight ‘Getting serious’ • The national play review
- nine ‘Lottery millions’ • The Children’s Play Initiative
- ten ‘Dirt is good’ • The Play England project
- eleven ‘The best place in the world’ • The Play Strategy for England
- twelve ‘Playbuilders’ • Breaking the mould of the public playground
- thirteen ‘Everyday adventures?’ • Austerity brings an end to play policy in England
- fourteen ‘Skylarks and canaries’ • The legacy of the Play Strategy
- fifteen ‘Children now’ • Responding to children’s right to play: conclusions and recommendations
- Epilogue
- References
- Index
Epilogue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 March 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Who’s who
- About the author
- Preface
- Foreword
- Prologue
- Introduction ‘To respect, protect and fulfil’
- one ‘To play and to dream’ • Restoring play to the heart of the campaign for children’s rights
- two ‘For a change’ • Finding the evidence for play policy
- three ‘Advocates for play’ • Playwork’s place at the heart of the play movement
- four ‘New opportunities’ • Lottery funding and the beginnings of public play policy
- five ‘A vital and vibrant city’ • How devolved government in London set a benchmark for play policy
- six ‘Making the case’ • The call for a national play strategy
- seven ‘Things to do, places to go?’ • How play was overlooked by children’s services reform
- eight ‘Getting serious’ • The national play review
- nine ‘Lottery millions’ • The Children’s Play Initiative
- ten ‘Dirt is good’ • The Play England project
- eleven ‘The best place in the world’ • The Play Strategy for England
- twelve ‘Playbuilders’ • Breaking the mould of the public playground
- thirteen ‘Everyday adventures?’ • Austerity brings an end to play policy in England
- fourteen ‘Skylarks and canaries’ • The legacy of the Play Strategy
- fifteen ‘Children now’ • Responding to children’s right to play: conclusions and recommendations
- Epilogue
- References
- Index
Summary
The actor, producer and former children’s TV presenter Floella Benjamin, now Baroness Benjamin OBE of Beckenham, rises to speak in the House of Lords, where she is a member for the Liberal Democratic Party. The Baroness, familiar to everyone of a certain age from her time on Playschool, the BBC’s iconic daily programme for pre-schoolers in the 1970s and 1980s, asks Lord Nash, a junior Education Minister in the new Conservative government, about nutrition in schools. She is rewarded with the promise of a new ‘national obesity framework’ by the end of the year and a meeting with the Minister to discuss what it should contain.
It is a mark of the very different world we now inhabit compared with the one of 2007 – when the Play Strategy was announced with a £225 million flourish by Ed Balls in the House of Commons – that this brief exchange about school food between two minor politicians in the upper chamber may represent the best opportunity for progressing policy for play in England over the course of the new Parliament. The general election of 7 May 2015 not only saw Ed Balls’s Labour party spectacularly fail to return to government in the face of an unexpected Conservative majority, but he himself lose his seat in Parliament altogether. If the result was widely regarded as a shock, this was nowhere more true than within the play movement, where there was a reasonable hope – if not quite an expectation – that our strongest political champion of recent years, far from leaving politics altogether, as he has subsequently announced, would be the new Chancellor of the Exchequer and might be persuaded to resurrect his vision for a child-friendly public realm supported by a long-term strategic government policy for play.
It was not to be. The leading party of a coalition government that, as CRAE (2015) asserts, ‘undermined children’s rights under Article 31 by abandoning a ten-year national play strategy (and) […] breaking a public commitment to develop an alternative cabinet-led approach to play policy’, now had a mandate to pursue its low-tax, low-intervention vision of a minimalist state unencumbered by centrist partners. Children’s play is unlikely to feature in its plans. Unless…
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- Policy for PlayResponding to Children's Forgotten Right, pp. 157 - 162Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2015