If your play environment looks and feels like a rich laboratory of creative expression, where every child is supported by knowledgeable staff to endlessly create and challenge themselves, you probably don’t need us. If not then get in touch because we really can do this.

Play is the way children learn all things they need to know that cannot be taught. OPAL helps your children develop a greatly increased range of ‘soft’ or ‘life’ skills

Develop skills
Whatever the quality of your curricular delivery is, a good primary school should also help children with a whole range of soft or life skills. These include cooperation, imagination, initiative, collaboration, resilience and risk-taking. There is a very good reason why the more intelligent a species is, the longer its young spend in play. The play process enables children to create an infinite variety of scenarios where these skills can be experimented with, tested and honed.

One purpose of play is to be a test laboratory for life skills. Getting things wrong is a necessity and to be welcomed as an essential part of the honing of skills. Schools with poor play knowledge shut down most of the possibilities for children to make social, physical, behavioural and decision-making mistakes and have a punitive response or aim to eliminate the possibility of future uncertainty and child agency.

Children in OPAL schools respond to a culture that accepts trial and error by rapidly gaining competence at risk management, self-control, conflict resolution, resource sharing and collaborative solutions.