Alexandra Long

A Plan for Play is an Eye View Series Report, published by The Children's Alliance. The Eye view Series Reports are authoritative ‘single issue’ studies designed for everyone to learn from and understand – from politicians to professionals, locally and nationally – and of course, parents and carers. The Plan for Play calls for children's play to be prioritised in primary schools, for school staff to receive training on the subject of play and for it to be prioritised beyond the EYFS. The report calls for ring-fenced funding for play, ensuring sufficient opportunities for play across all Local Authority areas, for play to be identified as a protected characteristic within the Equality Act 2010 and for all children to be able to fulfil their right to play when sick, in accordance with the NICE (2012) guidance

Charmaz (2014, p. 344) suggests that ‘a reflexive stance informs how the researcher conducts his or her research, relates to the research participants and represents them in written reports’. As playworkers, we position ourselves outside of children’s play, as observers looking in, often, though not always, trying to make sense of what we observe. How we interpret children’s play, our interventions and those of our peers and colleagues, is influenced by our own lived experiences, our biographies and the history we bring to the play setting. This article explores the place of reflexivity in playwork and proposes that when researching children’s play from a playwork perspective a Constructivist Grounded Theory approach responds to some of the unique characteristics of playwork and the ambiguity of children’s play.

Abstract The playwork sector has, since its development in the 1950’s, experienced periods of boom and bust. The 2000’s, saw significant investment and prioritisation of children’s right to play across the United Kingdom. This was followed by significant disinvestment during the 2010’s, as provision for children’s play became “a casualty of the austerity drive” (CRAE, 2015, p. 34). During the early 2010’s, in response to the increasingly marketised approach to funding for the third sector, many local authorities moved from direct play service delivery and grant allocation for children’s play, to commissioning services from the third sector. This study began as an exploration of the affects of commissioning on children’s play services. However, as a study adopting the Constructivist Grounded Theory Method, it soon became clear through early engagement with the field, that commissioning was not a route to sustainability for playwork provision. In the face of ever-decreasing funding for children’s play, the sector was looking to alternative ways to maintain their non-statutory but essential service for children, families and communities. Interviews with respondents representing 21 playwork projects from across England revealed that playwork provision was surviving not because of income generated through the process of commissioning, but through the deployment of skilled and knowledgable, committed and hard-working staff and volunteers. These individuals maintain a deep commitment to the underpinning professional and ethical framework for playwork, alongside the ethos of their very unique provision. The outcome of this study is a substantive theory, grounded in data, which provides a conceptual framework for how adventure playgrounds have survived a period of significant political and economic turbulence. This is underpinned by The Four Principles of Surviving, which provide a framework for practice for organisations not only in the playwork field, but across other third sector organisations.

The Big Lottery Fund's Children's Play Programme provided an ideal opportunity to gather evidence of the benefits of funding children's play provision. This paper proposes that without a systematic evaluation of the programme at a national level, an opportunity to evaluate consistently, the impact of the funding on outcomes for children's play was missed.

This paper discusses a research project undertaken during spring 2014, in response to the findings of the Play Sufficiency Assessment in one Welsh Local Authority. The results highlighted anomalous findings between two neighbouring communities regarding the children’s self-reported levels of satisfaction with opportunities to play. The research study aimed to identify factors which may have caused the disparity in satisfaction between the two communities. The findings of the research indicate that simply having more places to play is not automatically an indicator of satisfaction. Factors such as child and parental fear, socio-economic conditions and the development of a ‘play culture’ within communities have a more significant role in influencing children’s freedom and opportunities to play.

This chapter discusses the process of focused coding from a constructivist grounded theory (CGT) perspective (Charmaz 2014). After the first stage of open coding, which splinters the data for analysis, focused coding refocuses the data so that it can be reconstructed later during other stages of theory development. In this chapter, I summarise some of the key literature related to understanding the nature of focused coding, and I provide practical advice for helping readers to make the necessary shift towards this vital stage of the grounded theory method (GTM). An account of how focused coding was carried out during my PhD studies will offered not only as a real-world example, but also as a means of highlighting strategies which can enable new grounded theorists with ways of approaching focused coding with greater confidence.