England stops worrying, lets their kids get hurt

Educators find ways to get risk back into play

OK, SO WE’VE GOT A SANDPIT. WHAT CAN WE ADD TO THE SANDPIT TO MAKE IT MORE RISKY?

SHOE BURY NE SS, ENGLAND• Educators in Britain, after decades spent in a collective effort to minimize risk, are now cautiously getting into the business of providing it.

Four years ago, for instance, teachers at the Richmond Avenue Primary and Nursery School looked critically around their schoolyard and set about, as one of them put it, bringing in risk.

Out went the plastic playhouses and in came the dicey stuff: stacks of two-by-fours, crates and loose bricks. The schoolyard got a mud pit, a tire swing, log stumps and workbenches with hammers and saws.

“We thought, how can we bring that element of risk into your everyday environment?” said Leah Morris, who manages the early years program at the school in Shoeburyness in southeast Britain. “We were looking at, OK, so we’ve got a sandpit. What can we add to the sandpit to make it more risky?”

Now, Morris said proudly, “we have fires, we use knives, saws, different tools,” all under adult supervision. Indoors, scissors abound, and so do sharp-edged tape dispensers (“they normally only cut themselves once,” she said).

Limited risks are increasingly cast by experts as an experience essential to childhood development, useful in building resilience and grit.

Outside the Princess Diana Playground in Kensington Gardens in London, which attracts more than one million visitors a year, a placard informs parents that risks have been “intentionally provided so that your child can develop an appreciation of risk in a controlled play environment rather than taking similar risks in an uncontrolled and unregulated wider world.”

This view is tinged with nostalgia for an earlier Britain, in which children were tougher and more self-reliant. It resonates both with right-wing tabloids, which see it as a corrective to the cosseting of a liberal nanny state, and with progressives, drawn to a freer and more natural childhood. It is also supported by a growing list of government officials, among them Amanda Spielman, chief inspector of Ofsted, the powerful agency that inspects British schools.

Spielman has poked fun at schools for what she considers excessive risk aversion, describing as “simply barmy” measures like sending schoolchildren out on city field trips in high-visibility jackets. Late last year, she announced that her agency’s inspectors would undergo training that will encompass the positive, as well as the negative, side of risk.

“Inspections will creep into being a bit more riskaverse unless we explicitly train them to get a more sophisticated understanding of the balance between benefits and risk, and stand back and say, ‘It’s OK to have some risk of children falling over and bashing into things,’” she said.

“That’s not the same as being reckless and sending a two-year-old to walk on the edge of a 200-foot cliff unaccompanied.”

Britain is one of a number of countries where educators and regulators say a litigious, protective culture has gone too far, leaching healthy risks out of childhood. Guidelines on play from the government agency that oversees health and safety issues in Britain state that “the goal is not to eliminate risk.”

Australia last fall introduced new standards for playground equipment, instructing operators to consider the benefits, not just the risks, of activities that could result in injuries. Cities and school districts in Canada and Sweden are following suit.

Beginning in the late 1970s, parents were buffeted by warnings about hidden dangers on playgrounds and predators lurking in suburban neighbourhoods. Behaviour changed: In England, the percentage of schoolchildren who went to school unaccompanied dropped from around 85 per cent of nine-year-olds in 1971 to around 25 per cent in 1990, a team of British researchers found.

Play spaces also changed: Plank swings and steel merry-go-rounds disappeared, while impactabsorbent rubber surfacing spread over drop zones, driving up the cost of new playgrounds. A market appeared for lab-tested, safetycertified fibreglass boulders. The result has been a gradual sterilization of play, said Meghan Talarowski, an American landscape designer who has compared British and U.S. playgrounds.

“It’s a rubber floor, a little structure surrounded by a fence. It’s like a little play jail,” she said of playgrounds in the United States. “As a grown-up, you’re sitting there on your phone, waiting for them to be done.”

Talarowski, who was struck by how much more adventurous playgrounds were when she moved on London in 2015, threw herself into gathering data. Using a quantitative tool developed by the Rand Corp., a research centre, she used video to track the behaviour of 18,000 visitors to London playgrounds, then compared it with similar data on visitors to U.S. parks. The British playgrounds had 55 per cent more visitors, and children and teens were 16 to 18 per cent more active.

Society recoils every time a child is seriously hurt on a playground. Playground deaths are extremely rare — they occur once every three or four years in Britain — but they tap into a parent’s worst fear, and are amplified by widespread reporting.

Such reactions occur regularly after playground tragedies, even if they are statistically insignificant, said David Yearley of the Birmingham, England-based Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. “As a society, it’s difficult to say, ‘We need to accept a one-in60-million chance of death,” he said.