Tom Watson, the splendidly digitally literate Labour MP, asked me to write a 600 word piece for the Labour Uncut website on the Tory-led Coalition's cancellation of the £200 million playground building programme. I'm not usually contacted by the Labour party about anything - see Thoughtland - but I think the piece is worth cross-posting.
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Micheal Gove's cancellation of the playground building programme last week is a surprise to no-one familiar with the Gradgrindery of his general educational philosophy, proper history and Latin lessons an' all that. But it's worth remembering just what a triumph – to be honest, a somewhat unlikely triumph – for the outgoing New Labour administration this was.
It's true that when the then Children's Secretary Ed Balls announced, close to Xmas in 2007, that over £200 million was to be earmarked to build 3500 playgrounds, and then followed through in the subsequent two years, quite a few of us play advocates were continuously pinching ourselves.
New Labour, with its various invocations of a renewed work-ethic for the work-shy, and a notoriously exacting measurement culture in education, didn't seem the most propitious sponsor of the value and benefits of play - oblique, messy and experimental as play is. Balls didn't really join up his thinking either when he rejected the Cambridge Primary Review throughout 2009, which showed conclusively that an extended period of kindergarten-style play right up to the seventh year was the best developmental start for school children.
But nevertheless, there it was, alongside play initiatives from the Lottery Fund, and echoed throughout the devolved Parliaments - a commitment to building playgrounds as a step towards rethinking how we regard the activity of children in our public spaces, town and cities. It's tempting to say that, similar to our shifts on climate change, the scientific consensus on the health, cognitive and social benefits of more play in our lives - both children and adults - was becoming incontrovertible.
A staple in the rise of neuro-psychological and biological accounts of human nature over the last twenty years has been the role of play – meaning joyful experimentation, imagining and gaming with others - as the best exercise for the growing human mind (Melvin Konner's The Evolution of Childhood and Stuart Brown's Play are at the summits of research here). It could also be claimed that the UNICEF report on children's well-being in rich countries in 2007 – which placed the UK at the bottom of 23 industrialised nations – was an embarrassing wake-up call for a government which had made the welfare of children one of its moral back-stops.
Whatever the determining forces, it was certainly the feeling among the community of play workers and advocates I know that a line about the legitimacy of play, as a key part of human development throughout the life-span, had been crossed. Much ingenuity, commitment and invention has been pouring into this area across these islands.
And now, as this neo-neo-liberal Coalition makes sure it won't let a crisis go to waste, taking the chance to brutally shrink the state to pre-New-Labour levels, the playground building programme goes in its entirety – not even shrunk or trimmed, but dumped wholesale.
Again, if you wanted to find the inch between Tories and Labour in which you could live (and for that matter, any of the left-leaning devolved polities), a play policy for children would be it. Enabling good conditions of play is an investment in the ultimate long-term health and capacities of future citizens – a crucial and dynamic element of the “sure” start promised to children in the UK after the harshness of the Tory years.
Of course, play policy should have been extended beyond childhood to teenagedom and adulthood too. There is too much evidence – ably pulled together by Daniel Pink in his new book Drive - that the most creative and profitable modern organisations ensure “play” time for their employees: a small zone of joyful self-determination increases overall productivity and effectiveness by considerable degrees. Shouldn't we be socialising our future creative workers to expect a degree of dynamic play in their lives?
How about that: it turns out that the Tory-led coalition doesn't know how to ensure the social conditions of the future of information capitalism either. Excuse me for being childish – but quelle surprise!
Pat Kane is a writer, musician, activist and play advocate. He is author of The Play Ethic (http://www.theplayethic.com), one half of Hue And Cry (http://www.hueandcry.co.uk) and an irrecoverable left-leaning supporter of Scottish independence (but likes Labour lefties like Compass).
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