At Staindrop CE Primary, we are passionate in ensuring that our outdoor play offer is as vibrant, creative and innovative as our academic curriculum.  We are committed to ensuring that quality play opportunities are available to all our children as play is essential for physical, emotional, social, spiritual and intellectual development. We plan for, resource and evaluate the quality of play provision as if it were an important human right, essential to all aspects of children’s development and a source of joy and happiness that every child can access, because it truly is all of those things.

To ensure all pupils access 1 hour of quality outdoor play each day, we implement the ‘OPAL’ (Outdoor Play and Learning) offer and have been developing this since Spring 2023.

OPAL is an award-winning, mentor supported school improvement programme that addresses all the areas that schools must plan for if they want to strategically and sustainably improve the quality of their play opportunities. It is the only programme of its kind that has been independently proven to sustainably improve the quality of play in British primary schools. OPAL is based on the idea that as well as learning through good teaching, your children also learn when they play, and as 20% of their time in school is playtime, we want to make sure that this amount of time (equivalent to 1.4 years of primary school) is as good as possible.

Through a quality play provision, children develop:

• Creative skills – like building a den, raft or a vehicle with loose parts
• Cognitive skills – like maths and problem solving in a pretend grocery store
• Physical abilities – like building, balancing, swinging and cycling
• Emotional skills – like sharing, turn taking and resolving conflicts
• New vocabulary – like the words they need to play with toy dinosaurs
• Social skills – like playing together in a pretend car wash or putting together a play in the theatre area
• Literacy skills – like creating a recipe for a mudpie in the investigation station

All children from Reception to Year 6 can develop the above skills through our provision which is constantly being reviewed and adapted by our OPAL Play Team. Here are some images of OPAL in action @ Staindrop!

How can you help?

There are certain things children must have in order to be able to play safely and have fun during OPAL play times. These include:

• Having clothing that you can play in safely
• Having things to play with
• Having a certain amount of freedom
• Having the opportunity to manage risk

As the school improves play opportunities for your children, you may find that we ask you for donations of resources or equipment that we feel would benefit play in our play zones. We may make changes to how the children use the school grounds. For example, children may use more of the grounds for more of the year, which requires suitable clothing to do so e.g wellies, waterproofs. Your children may get a bit messier, be exposed to more challenges and have greater freedoms to play where, with whom and how they like. The experiences the school is fostering are essential for children’s physical and mental well-being and healthy and in line with all current good practice advice on health safety, well-being and development. We appreciate your support with delivering our OPAL programme.

You will find more information about OPAL using the website link below.

The OPAL Primary Programme – Outdoor Play And Learning