Our Play Sufficiency Package focuses on embedding consideration of children’s right to play within organisational systems and developing an organisational culture best suited to supporting children’s play.
The initial assessment provides a thorough account of the ways in which spaces, services, practices and policies currently work across the region to support or constrain children’s opportunities for play. It also provides an opportunity to identify ways in which adult run organisations can improve their responsibilities towards children and their play. This will in turn inform the development of a strategic action plan aimed at cultivating more favourable conditions for children’s play, resulting in children’s and adult’s increased satisfaction with opportunities for play.
The assessment and subsequent action plan will explore and influence work across a wide range of departments, including those associated with policy development and strategic partnerships, the built and natural environment, and community and children’s services.
Our Play Sufficiency Package has been designed to support the following objectives:
- Identify assets that support play which need to be protected.
- Identify constraining factors that serve to restrict children’s play.
- Identify gaps in information, service provision, partnership working and policy implementation with regards to children’s play.
- Highlight or suggest ways in which these gaps and constraining factors might be addressed.
- Provide a monitoring system, generating ‘baseline’ evidence with which future developments can be compared / evaluated / assessed.
- Involve a wide range of partners in considering the sufficiency of children’s opportunities for play.
- Improve people’s collective knowledge and understanding about the conditions that support children’s play and the ways in which these can be protected and improved.
Our preferred method of delivery, and the most cost effective, is to work with organisations supporting theirimplementation of our play sufficiency process through a knowledge transfer partnership. This structured and mentor led approach ensures organisations can be confident in producing a detailed and comprehensive assessment, accompanied by a well-informed action plan. Through active involvement in the assessment process, practitioners and policy leads will develop their collective understanding of play sufficiency and develop a greater sense of ownership over the findings and subsequent actions.
Our package of support includes:
- The development of a bespoke methodology and assessment project plan
- Regular mentoring sessions for those tasked with leading on the assessment
- Training for other policy leads and those undertaking research for the assessment
- Access to our tried and tested methods, research tools and other policy documents
- Online survey tools, data analysis tables and support to identify case study communities
- ‘Playing with data’ workshops, supporting researchers to make sense of data gathered through face-to-face research with children and parents.
- Action planning workshops, sharing findings from the research with children and supporting partners to identify strategic priorities
- Real life examples of what works and how to make lasting changes
- Review and feedback on the assessment and action plan documents produced
- Ongoing advice and support throughout the assessment and action planning process
Outputs from this work will include:
- A full play sufficiency assessment report identifying current levels of satisfaction, strategic priorities, strengths and weaknesses of organisational systems and recommended areas for improvement.
- A strategic and cross-departmental action plan, making best use of the human and financial resources available.
- The establishment of an informed strategic group with lead responsibility for play across the region.
The cost of the current programme is £14,500 plus travel expenses and VAT. This includes direct support through 14 planning, mentoring, training and workshop sessions, as well as ongoing advice throughout the process and access to all the documentation required to transform your organisation’s thinking about play.
Our Play Sufficiency Package incorporates 10 distinct stages of work, divided into three broader phases. Each phase has particular outcomes, outputs and opportunities for publicity and public engagement. It is possible that each phase could be funded in turn to make the overall cost of the project more manageable and provide more regular project completion dates, however the full assessment is likely to take somewhere in the region of 12 to 18 months (depending on the capacity of those leading on this work).
For further information see our introduction to play sufficiency or read about the value of play sufficiency from a population health perspective.