OPAL

OPAL - Outdoor Play and Learning

Here at Barming Pre-School and Primary School we believe play should be an exciting opportunity to learn and we are committed to ensuring quality play opportunities are available to all our children. We believe that play is essential for physical, emotional, social, spiritual and intellectual development of each child. The school acknowledges the UN Charter on the Rights of the Child, especially Article 31, and supports the child’s right to play.

Most of our best childhood memories are from playing outdoors, climbing trees and exploring the wide world around us.

OPAL gives us the opportunity to give those memories to your children.

This is a long term project that will benefit us all 🙂

What is OPAL Play?

Children spend 20% of their time in school playing. To ensure that this time and our fantastic school grounds are used to their full potential our school has adopted an OPAL (Outdoor Play and Learning) philosophy that allows the children freedom to explore play in their own imaginative ways, often using found and gathered resources in the natural outdoor environment.

An OPAL approach promotes a more inclusive play environment in which all children can feel comfortable to express themselves. Our OPAL journey began in spring of 2023 and since this time, we have quickly transformed our outdoor environment. Our children love the new outdoor opportunities that OPAL offers with so much more for them to do, no matter the weather! From playing with tyres and digging in the sand pit, to enjoying imaginative play in the mud kitchen, OPAL offers an exciting alternative to the standard playground activities.

Through this approach to play children are not only more active at lunch or break times, but they are also having the opportunity to further develop life skills such as cooperation, team work and problem solving. They are becoming motivated and enthusiastic builders, engineers, explorers and designers.

The Value of Play

Play is defined as any freely chosen activity which a child finds satisfying and creative. It may or may not involve equipment or other people. We believe the learning opportunities of play include: -

• Emotions e.g. learning about oneself and others, sadness/gladness, rejection/acceptance, frustration/achievement, boredom/fascination, fear/confidence.
• Social interactions - enhancing self-esteem and understanding of others through freely chosen interactions e.g. within peer groups, with individuals, with groups of different ages, abilities, interests, gender, ethnicity and culture.
• Making choices, problem solving, being creative,
• Playing with scrap materials, tyres and other multipurpose objects –
• Achieving and also coping with failing,
• Communication and negotiation skills

The Adults Role in Play

The school will help children maximise the benefits they can gain from play by provision of our trained OPAL Team who are informed by and work to the Play work Principles.

Adults guide the children and their play..

• How could you make that more stable?
• Do you think that play is safe? What could happen?
• Could you support your friend to improve that design and make the task more challenging?

We use a mixture of the following play supervisions:

• Free-range play is where pupils are given permission to use and explore the school grounds or at least part of them without direct supervision.
• Specific supervised play for activities such as tree climbing, large loose parts building and sand/water play!

Risks and Benefits for our children

The children take part in regular Opal Play assemblies (at least once a term) in which the children identify potential risks with new equipment and resources being introduced to the outdoor learning environment.

 ‘Play is great for children’s well-being and development. When planning and providing play opportunities, the goal is not to eliminate risk, but to weigh up the risks and benefits. No child will learn about risk if they are wrapped in cotton wool’ 

Managing Risk in Play Provision: Implementation guide is published for Play England2012. 

At Barming: 

• We use the Health and Safety Executive guidance document ‘Children’s Play and Leisure – Promoting a Balanced Approach’ (September 2012) as the principle value statement informing its approach to managing risk in play. 
• We use the risk/benefit approach when managing our play provision.
• We use dynamic risk management with the children encouraging  the children to identify and manage risks in an environment where adults are present to support them.