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Play Practitioners Early years Educational Consultant and Professional Development
'It is in playing, and perhaps only

21/09/2026

I kept hearing that some children arrive lacking cultural capital.

So I asked a reception class what they valued. Nobody had thought to ask them.

To explain it, I said: cultural capital is the things you know, the things you can do, and the things that matter to you.
In short, your superpower.

They understood it instantly, and they had plenty. Knowing exactly what they wanted to learn. Trying on who they might be. Learning through their whole body. Learning best alongside other people. Carrying knowledge handed down from grandparents. Learning everywhere they went.

Six superpowers. None of which appeared on a reception assessment.

What is your quietest child's superpower, and where is it recorded?

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20/09/2026

Every school report I ever brought home said some version of the same thing. She's a bit quiet. I wish she would put her hand up. I wish she would say more.

I now speak for a living, which I find funny most days.

Those words land somewhere. Quiet, shy, lacking confidence. Children take them in and try them on, and some keep them for decades.

So how were you described as a child? And are you still carrying it?

Nobody decides to abandon a good idea. The day simply gets there first.That is worth saying out loud in a staff meeting,...
18/09/2026

Nobody decides to abandon a good idea. The day simply gets there first.

That is worth saying out loud in a staff meeting, because most teams are carrying a quiet sense that they failed at something. They did not. They were handed something with nothing to hold onto.
What great ideas, given during professional learning, were never realised once the session was finished?

Theory is easy. Tuesday is hard.You read something with real substance in it. You agree with all of it.Then you look up ...
18/09/2026

Theory is easy. Tuesday is hard.

You read something with real substance in it. You agree with all of it.

Then you look up and there is a four-year-old in front of you doing something the theory never mentioned, and a parent at half past three asking why their child is playing rather than reading.

The gap between those two things is where most professional learning dies.

Play, Deliberately Designed: The Enquiry starts on the other side of that gap. One question your team chooses, twelve weeks, your own rooms, your own children.

What is the one thing your team would want to look at properly over twelve weeks?

A team I worked with was producing about forty written observations a week between them.Almost none of it was being read...
17/09/2026

A team I worked with was producing about forty written observations a week between them.

Almost none of it was being read.

We stopped roughly a third of it. The evidence base did not weaken. It got stronger, because what was left was the part that changed what happened next for a child.

Here are seven questions to work out which of yours is load-bearing and which is habit.

Save this one and take it to your next team meeting.

Which of your paperwork would you defend if somebody asked you to justify the hours?

Somebody good came in. Fifty minutes, the room was warm, people wrote things down. On the way out somebody said it was t...
16/09/2026

Somebody good came in. Fifty minutes, the room was warm, people wrote things down. On the way out somebody said it was the best session they had had in years.

Then Monday arrived.

The register. The child crying at the door. The parent who wanted a word. The resource that had gone missing again.

By the second week of term, the session had disappeared.

I want to be careful here, because this is the point where leaders start blaming themselves or their teams. That is what a one off does, every single time.

Learning that arrives from outside, in a room away from the children, is not relevant when Tuesday starts.

The embedded version looks different. One question, named by the team rather than handed to them. Twelve weeks of watching it happen in their own rooms, with the children in front of them. Somebody experienced coming back every fortnight to ask the next question, and the awkward one nobody has said out loud. Then something written down at the end, by the people who did the work.

That last part matters more than it sounds. A team believes its own evidence in a way it will never believe mine.

So a question rather than a plan. When did professional learning last change what happened in your rooms three weeks later?

Read my insights on this today https://www.playpractitioners.com/blog/course-everyone-loved

14/09/2026

We spend a lot of time assessing children.

They spend all day assessing us.

Every movement, every bit of body language, every small change in tone. They are working out which children in this room get celebrated and which ones get corrected.

That child who told me they only spoke English had already done the maths. They had decided I would think less of them if they mentioned French.

A four-year-old made that calculation about an adult they had met ten minutes earlier.

So, a harder question than the one we usually ask. Which children do you find yourself correcting most often, and is that a pattern?

Somebody left this standing.That decision looks small. It is one of the clearest signals I know about what a room believ...
13/09/2026

Somebody left this standing.

That decision looks small. It is one of the clearest signals I know about what a room believes.

A room that tidies everything away every day tells children their work ends when an adult says so. A room that lets one thing stay tells them their thinking is worth returning to.

Watch who comes back to it the next morning. That is the child who has work in progress rather than activities, and you will learn more from those two minutes than from a week of observations.

What is standing in your room tonight?

Five things worth doing this half term. None of them carry a cost.Write down which framework assesses your Early Years a...
12/09/2026

Five things worth doing this half term. None of them carry a cost.

Write down which framework assesses your Early Years and when the window opens. Ask your phase lead to describe the provision area by area and give them a fortnight. Check the compliance layer separately from the quality layer, because ratios and records cap a grade regardless of how good the teaching is. Ask two adults in different rooms the same question about the same activity. Give the phase one hour on a leadership agenda before December.

Every one of those takes somebody willing to ask out loud.

Which would be hardest to do in your school, and what does that tell you?

You're never too old to play!Do you know this game? It requires skill, I clearly do not have!
10/09/2026

You're never too old to play!
Do you know this game?
It requires skill, I clearly do not have!

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