Our Play - OPAL
Amazing play, everyday, for every child
Find out more about our plans for play using OPAL in the Parent Information Meeting via Zoom. Thursday 30th October 2025 at 7pm. The zoom link will be emailed soon.
Barham Primary School are proud to be an OPAL school. 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. OPAL is the only programme of its kind that has been independently proven to sustainably improve the quality of play in British primary schools. Barham Primary began their journey with OPAL in September 2025. We have surveyed the children, staff and parents to see how we can improve playtimes. 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. 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.
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?
Play is not messing about. It is the process evolution has come up with to enable children to learn all of the things that cannot be taught, while also having so much fun. There are certain things children must have in order to be able to play. These include:
- Having clothes that they can play in.
- Having things to play with - including loose parts.
- Having a certain amount of freedom.
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 alongside the national team at the OPAL College, supporting 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.