Today's pupils learn yesterday's games

Today's pupils learn yesterday's games

Amelia Hill, education correspondent
Sunday June 26, 2005
The Observer

A fear of injury and litigious parents has consigned the rough and tumble of the playground and its traditional games to history lessons at schools across the country.
Games such as tag, conkers and British bulldog have been outlawed by teachers in case they are sued for children's injuries, while other traditional pastimes are dying out because children simply see them as 'uncool'.

But now schools are going back to basics, hiring dedicated staff and holding workshops to encourage pupils to abandon their PlayStations and go back to the playground.

Notre Dame Preparatory School in Surrey has hired a 'playground co-ordinator' to teach their 340 girls, aged from two to 11, the lost art of cat's cradle, clapping games and chanting songs often going back to the Fifties.

'I have got them being children again,' said Isabel Cox, who made the decision to educate her pupils in the lost art of traditional games. 'Children have to grow up very fast nowadays and their lives are organised by parents and teachers from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to bed. When they have spare time, they don't know what to do with it. They have forgotten how to play.'

Cox has organised a workshop on skipping and held lessons on how to play with wooden hoops and balls. She also persuaded the head to spend hours explaining the marble games of his youth, while the PE teacher agreed to show the girls how to do handstands and cartwheels.

Headteacher David Plummer said: 'The climate in the playground has been transformed. It is much more collaborative, with all the girls playing together in large groups and the older children teaching and helping the younger children.

'Break times can be terribly hostile, but the group dynamic of these old-fashioned games is enabling the girls to explore new friendships. There is definitely less tension in the playground. The girls are playing all sorts of games and passing them on to their sisters and friends in other schools.'

Marie Ann Battle, whose nine-year-old daughter, Hattie, is a pupil at Notre Dame, is delighted by her child's new repertoire of games.

'I could never add anything to the games Hattie played before and could feel the age gap between us growing,' she said. 'But now we can play together all the time and she loves it.'

Experts in children's play, however, warned that 'teaching' children how to play could be counter-productive.

'Children are the experts when it comes to play,' said Wendy Russell, children's play expert at the University of Gloucestershire. 'They are playing the same games they have always done, they have just adapted them to modern themes.

'Play helps to encourage adaptability rather than teaching specific skills, which is what happens if you hold something like a skipping workshop. What we are doing by teaching them specific games is blaming them for not playing the way we think they should, rather than looking at the way they choose to play.'

Marc Armitage, who has worked for more than 600 schools in his 20-year career as an independent play consultant, blames the layout of playgrounds for any decline in traditional game playing.

'Square and rectangular playgrounds lack quiet corners in which children have the time and peace to develop games,' he said. 'But these games don't need to be taught: they can disappear for two or three years and suddenly reappear.'