Play Practitioners

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

The writing table had faced a blank wall for years.Nobody put it there badly. Somebody put it there once, on a busy day ...
19/08/2026

The writing table had faced a blank wall for years.

Nobody put it there badly. Somebody put it there once, on a busy day in September, and then the year started and nobody looked again.

We moved one shelving unit beside it. That was the whole change.

By the Friday, children were playing in that corner in a way they had not before. Staying longer. Coming back to it.

Nobody had judged the old layout. They simply had not pictured a different one.

You often cannot see what a room is doing to the learning until you see it doing something else.

Which corner of your room have you walked past so many times that you have stopped seeing it?

17/08/2026

From September, statutory compliance will appear before your grade.

Two updates landed the same day. Treat them as one piece of work.

Two weeks of framework changes, vetting files and notification thresholds. Let me finish somewhere else.None of it chang...
16/08/2026

Two weeks of framework changes, vetting files and notification thresholds. Let me finish somewhere else.

None of it changes what good Early Years practice looks like.

Nothing in this update touches how children learn, what curiosity does to a brain, or why forty minutes with a cardboard box is worth more than a worksheet.

What it changes is the floor. And the floor matters, because a process gap can hold back a setting doing beautiful work with children.

That is the whole reason I have spent a fortnight on this. Close those gaps in August, and September belongs to the children rather than to your filing.

I came into this work through my own classrooms, and then through a Masters at UCL that gave me the language for something I had felt for years. That children are asked to conform long before anyone asks what they bring. Play is where that gets undone.

So protect the play. Do the paperwork in August so it stops competing for the same hours.

What are you protecting this term?

16/08/2026

None of this changes what good Early Years practice looks like.

It raises the floor. Close the gaps in August and the beginning of term belongs to the children.

Seven areas. This is what an Early Years inspection actually looks at.Safeguarding. How strong the culture is, and wheth...
15/08/2026

Seven areas. This is what an Early Years inspection actually looks at.

Safeguarding. How strong the culture is, and whether every member of staff lives it.

Inclusion. Children with SEND, children who are disadvantaged, and whether any child is being left behind without anyone noticing.

Curriculum and teaching. Whether your play-based curriculum is documented and sequenced, and the balance between child-led play and intentional teaching.

Achievement. What children know, remember and can do, seen in the children rather than in the files.

Behaviour, attitudes and routines. Levels of involvement and independence, and whether your environment invites learning.

Welfare and wellbeing. How safe and settled every child feels, and their sense of belonging.

Leadership and governance. Whether Early Years has a clear vision, and how honest the self-evaluation is.

The one where I see strong settings fall short most often is the third. Not because the teaching is weak. Because the written curriculum, the plans and the sequence sit thinner than the practice does.

Which of the seven would you want a week's notice on?

14/08/2026

Your interactive whiteboard sits inside the new screen use guidance. So do the tablets. So does the wet Friday video.

Half a page is enough to have a position.

14/08/2026

The folders are not what they look at.

I know how much work goes into them. I have made them myself, in my own classrooms, late into the evening.

What gets looked at is the children. Involvement. Attention. Independence. Whether the room draws them in.

So the question worth asking is not whether your evidence is ready. It is whether your provision would hold up to somebody standing at the edge of the room for twenty minutes.

What would they see in yours?

13/08/2026

There is one change in the EYFS update that arrives without a deadline attached to it. Which is exactly why it will get missed.

Screen use guidance for early years settings now sits inside the framework.

Have regard to is a real legal standard. Above a suggestion, below an absolute requirement.

Read it, form a position, be able to explain your reasoning. That is the bar.

Half a page is enough. What screens are for in your rooms, what they are not for, and why.

Have you written yours yet?

12/08/2026

A banned dog breed rule and a safeguarding threshold change printed at the same weight.

That is why I regrouped them.

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