Piece by piece, five-year-old Maya is assembling a castle from wooden blocks. In her head, dragons circle its towers, knights ride to the rescue, and a sorcerer plots below; a whole world is taking shape around her. She has no idea that inventing worlds like this is quietly laying the foundations of her imagination — something that will echo through her adult life.
A little later the castle is forgotten, and Maya is playing shops with her brother instead. Ordering him about as the 'shopkeeper', she is rehearsing, through pretence, how to keep her feelings in check. When the two grow bored of that and settle over a card game, what she absorbs is the importance of sharing and of taking turns.
'In all its enormous variety, play is among the finest things our species has ever produced,' says Professor Aldous Renwick of the School of Education at the University of Wexbridge. 'It lies beneath our growth into thoughtful, problem-solving adults, and it is central to why humans adapt so well to almost any circumstance.'
None of this recognition is new. Almost two thousand years ago the Roman teacher Quintilian was already praising play as a way of preparing the young for the demands of adulthood, and theories of learning through play have been taking shape steadily since the 1800s.
Yet the world is not standing still, and Renwick is conscious of a decline in play. As cities spread outwards, ever more children are brought up in cramped city flats with nowhere green to run. 'The chance to play freely, which I had on almost any day of my own childhood, is slipping away,' he says. Outdoor play is held back partly by fears about fast-moving vehicles, partly by parents' determination to keep their children safe from strangers, and partly by a belief that 'the sooner the better' — one that has loaded ever more pressure onto academic work in schools.
Organisations of global reach, the United Nations and the European Union among them, have started drawing up policies to protect a child's right to play and to weigh what this means for parks, playgrounds and school curricula. What tends to be missing, however, is the hard data on which sound policy has to rest.
'What interests us is the play a child starts alone — spontaneous, impossible to predict — and the trouble is that the moment you tell a five-year-old "go and play", you the researcher have already interfered,' says Dr Marta Ostrowski. 'And what we're after is the effect play has years down the line. It's a genuinely hard thing to pin down.'
Dr Cillian Boyd agrees. A few pieces of the puzzle — how play matters, and why — have been examined, but almost nothing is known about the mark it leaves on the rest of a child's future.
With the university's newly opened Centre for the Study of Play, Learning and Development behind them, Renwick, Ostrowski, Boyd and their fellow researchers aim to supply exactly the evidence that has been missing about how play shapes a child's growth.
'One likely outcome is that play feeds the early growth of a child's self-control,' Ostrowski suggests. 'By that I mean the capacity to become aware of one's own thinking as it unfolds — and it has a bearing on how well we tackle anything demanding.'
In one experiment with toddlers and slightly older pre-schoolers, Ostrowski observed that those with stronger self-control worked through problems faster when faced with an unfamiliar apparatus that called for scientific reasoning. 'Findings like these lead us to think that letting children play will, over the years, turn them into better problem-solvers.'
Should play really assist this part of a child's development, the team argues, the consequences for teaching could be considerable — for the power to self-regulate has already proved one of the surest signs of how well a child will go on to perform academically.
Boyd adds a further point: 'The way a child plays is also a telling sign of healthy social and emotional growth. In earlier work of mine, I looked at how watching children at play can offer valuable hints about their well-being — and can even help in identifying neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism.'
Renwick's own recent work has gone into building a play-based method for helping children write. 'Many primary-age children struggle with writing, but an earlier study of ours showed that a playful prompt worked far better than a straightforwardly instructional one.' The children produced longer, better-organised stories when they had first acted out the characters with hand puppets. In the latest study, the pupils began instead by modelling those characters in clay, with much the same results. 'Teachers kept telling me that in the past children constantly complained they had nothing to write about. Once the clay modelling came in, not one child said that all year.'
Renwick, who now heads the centre, first qualified as a primary teacher back in the early 1970s — a time, in his words, when 'the teaching of the very young was something of a still pond, disturbed by no real intellectual argument at all.' The scene today could hardly be more different, with questions like the right age to begin school fiercely contested.
'Somehow, in the last few decades, we have let the worth of play slip from view. It gets dismissed as a triviality, or cast as the unwelcome opposite of "work". Its rewards deserve to be remembered, as do the profound contributions play makes to all that humans accomplish in art, science and technology. Children, above all, should be guaranteed a full and varied diet of play.'
