Our Play - OPAL
Amazing play, everyday, for every child
Here at Barham CE Primary School, we see play as essential to realising our vision to encourage our children to be kind, confident and curious.
Kind - to other children of different ages, through collaborative and inclusive play and to nature.
Confident - to manage risk, make independent choices and resolve disputes peacefully.
Curious - through exploring, manipulating and experiencing diverse, open-ended opportunities for exploration and discovery.
Barham Primary began their journey with OPAL in September 2025. We are working to achieve our OPAL award over the next 2 years.
OPAL is based on the idea that, as well as learning through good teaching, your children also learn when they play. In a primary school setting, children spend approximately 20% of their time (or 1.4 years) at play. Providing a high-quality, nourishing, enjoyable play environment is part of our core offer. 76% of UK children spend less than 1 hour per day outdoors and the National Trust found that the time spent playing outside has declined by 50% in a generation. We pledge to make sure that time spent at play at Barham Primary maximises the benefits for each child.
There are many proven benefits for schools that carry out the OPAL Primary Programme. They usually include: more enjoyment of school, less teaching time lost to disputes between children, fewer accidents and greatly improved behaviour.
What makes good play?
At Barham, we adopt the International Definition of Play:
“Play is a process that is freely chosen, intrinsically motivated and self-directed.”
Our school recognises the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child:
Article 31 – the right to play, recreation and leisure
Article 12 – the right of children to be listened to on matters important to them
Our school embraces the Health and Safety Executive’s approach to the importance of play.
As the school improves play opportunities for children, you may find we ask you for resources and make changes about how the children use the school grounds. They may use more of the grounds, for more of the year. 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 are fostering are essential for children’s physical and mental wellbeing and are in line with all current good practice advice on health and safety, wellbeing and development.
Whilst it may appear to some that OPAL is just be about giving things to children to play with, it is actually MUCH more than this. There are a team of people who run this initiative in the school and they work with OPAL (Opal Play and Learning) who support us in the programme of training, risk-assessing, installation, maintenance and reviewing. The children are crucially involved in leading their own play and so regular assemblies and class discussions engage the children in negotiations and decisions over OPAL activities.
