A right that England has chosen to overlook
Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child sets out every child's right to play, and it has done so since 1989. It sits alongside the rights to education, to health and to protection from harm, with no qualifying language to suggest it should be treated as the lesser sibling of the four. And yet, in practice, it has been the easiest of those rights to compromise on, to defer, and to quietly forget when timetables get tight, planning applications get contested, or budgets come under pressure.
The map of how seriously each part of the United Kingdom takes that right is, by now, an awkward one for England. Wales has had play sufficiency legislation since 2012, placing a statutory duty on local authorities to assess and secure play opportunities for children in their area. Scotland followed in 2023. Wales incorporated the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into domestic law in 2011, and Scotland did so in 2024. England has done neither. Children in Cardiff and Glasgow have legal protections in relation to their right to play that children in London, Manchester and Twickenham simply do not.
This is the gap that Play England's new ten-year strategy has been built to close, and it is the gap I want to write about here.
An interest to declare, and an origin story
I should be open about why this matters to me, beyond the obvious importance of the cause itself. I am Vice Chair of Play England, and the case for a play-based childhood is one I have been working on, in different forms and from different vantage points, for a long time.
In an earlier chapter of my career at the LEGO Foundation, I was part of the team that launched, led and funded the global campaign that successfully made the case to the United Nations for international recognition of a Day of Play. That work culminated in the UN's designation of 11 June as the International Day of Play, a moment that mattered not because a day on the calendar can solve anything by itself, but because rights need visibility in order to be defended. The day was always intended as a foothold for a longer conversation about what childhood is for, what it requires, and what we are collectively willing to protect on behalf of children who have no vote and very little voice in the systems that shape their lives.
That conversation is the one we are now trying to take forward in England.
The Play 31 Challenge
This year's International Day of Play falls on 11 June. Play England, working alongside the UK Children's Play Policy Forum and the International Play Association networks in Ireland, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Cymru Wales, is calling on every school in the UK and Ireland to do one specific and entirely doable thing on that day. Give children 31 more minutes to play. Thirty-one minutes for Article 31. The theme of this year's campaign is Protect play, protect childhood, and it is a deliberately modest ask designed to open a much larger door.
The point is not really the minutes themselves. It is what they signal, and what they make visible. A school that finds 31 extra minutes on 11 June has demonstrated, in the most practical terms possible, that play is something the school day can accommodate when the will is there. It has also given itself permission to ask the more interesting question, which is what else might be possible on the other 364 days of the year.
Why play, and why it has been allowed to slip
The case for play, when it is set out properly, is not a sentimental one. Play is how children build the connections, the resilience and the social fluency on which the rest of their development depends. It is how they learn to navigate friendship and conflict, to take and manage risk, to encounter difference, and to conquer the fears that, left unchallenged, would shape them as adults. The evidence base for this is now substantial. Play is not what is left over once the serious work of childhood has been completed. It is, in a real sense, the work itself.
That case used to be self-evident in a way it no longer is. The contemporary picture of childhood in England is one of steady contraction. Today's children, on average, are allowed out to play unsupervised at around the age of eleven. Their parents' generation were allowed out at around nine. Two years sounds modest as a single number, but stacked across a generation it represents an enormous reduction in the lived experience of unsupervised, child-led play, and that is before any account is taken of the parallel decline in the spaces where such play might happen. The number of staffed adventure playgrounds in England fell from 253 in 1980 to 126 in 2021. Break times in schools have shortened. Streets have been ceded to traffic, to liability concerns and to the assumption that children belong indoors. Public space has been quietly reorganised around the convenience of adults.
The political response has, with one notable exception, been silence. The 2008 National Play Strategy, the only one this country has ever had, was backed by £235 million and a serious vision to embed play in planning, housing, schools, transport and public realm policy. It was abandoned in 2010, and nothing has replaced it since. That is not a story about austerity, or at least not only about austerity. It is a story about choices that were made and have not been revisited.
It All Starts with Play: a strategy for the next ten years
This is the context in which Play England, under the leadership of our Executive Director Eugene Minogue, published its new ten-year strategy in May 2025. It is called It All Starts with Play!, and its objective is unembarrassed: to restore a play-based childhood for all children in England by 2035.
The strategy is organised around four interconnected priorities, each of which addresses one of the dimensions in which play has been allowed to erode. The first, Spaces, concerns the physical and digital environments in which play actually happens, from streets, parks and playgrounds to schools and the digital realm. The second, Skills, focuses on the people who make play possible, including playworkers, teachers, parents, carers, planners and designers, and on the recognition and support those roles need if children are to have trusted adults around them who understand and protect their right to play. The third, Systems, addresses the policy, funding and legislative architecture that has been allowed to collapse and now needs rebuilding, including a renewed national strategy and a statutory framework for play sufficiency. The fourth, Society, takes on the longer cultural work of re-norming play as something every child has a right to, not something to be permitted, scheduled, supervised or apologised for.
Beneath these four priorities sits Dr Naomi Lott's STAR framework, developed at the University of Reading. STAR stands for Space, Time, Acceptance and Rights, and it is a practical model for what implementing Article 31 actually requires. Children need physical and mental space in which to play. They need protected, unstructured time in which to do so. They need the cultural acceptance that says play is welcome rather than tolerated, and they need the legal and policy framework that secures all of the above as a right rather than a courtesy. Strip out any one of those four conditions and Article 31 collapses into a slogan. The strategy is, in effect, a plan for putting all four back in place.
Two asks of government
The strategy makes two specific asks of national government, and neither is novel. The first is a new National Play Strategy, with cross-government backing, equal in seriousness to the 2008 strategy that was scrapped fifteen years ago. The second is play sufficiency legislation along the lines that Wales and Scotland already have in place, placing a statutory duty on local authorities to assess, plan and secure play opportunities for every child, and to recognise play as essential infrastructure within the planning system. Both have working precedents elsewhere in the UK. Both are achievable inside this Parliament if the political will exists. Neither requires anything that other countries have not already done.
A political moment that may, finally, be opening
For the first time in years, the political weather may be turning. In January 2025, Parliament held its first debate on play in eight years, and the longest debate on play in seventeen. The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Play has been reactivated and is gaining traction. And the Culture, Media and Sport Committee's recently published Game On report, following a year-long inquiry, is the most substantive parliamentary intervention on children's physical activity in a generation.
The report's recommendations are striking in their ambition. They include a statutory duty on local authorities to provide sporting and leisure facilities, an increase in government spending on sport and recreation from 0.3 per cent of total expenditure to 0.6 per cent over the next decade, PE granted the same status in schools as English, mathematics and science, and legislation requiring local authorities and housing associations to remove unnecessary "no ball games" signs in order to make public space more usable for children's play. That last recommendation is small, but it carries a weight that exceeds its size. The "no ball games" sign is the most visible symbol of how much ground has been ceded over the last few decades. It tells children, in plain English, that the spaces around their homes are not for them. Removing the signs does not, by itself, solve anything. But it changes the message, and the message has been wrong for a long time.
Game On is about sport and physical activity rather than play in itself, and the distinction matters. But the two agendas are inseparable in practice. Play is the foundation on which sport is built. Without play, children do not develop the resilience, the physical literacy and the social skills that sport assumes are already in place. Progress on one without the other will be limited.
The 31 minutes is the easy part
Article 31 is not a luxury clause. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child treats play as a right, in the same paragraph as the rights to education, to health and to protection. England's failure to enshrine that right in domestic law, while every other UK nation has done so, is a choice. So is the absence of a National Play Strategy. So is the gradual squeezing of play out of schools, streets and public space.
The Play 31 Challenge asks schools for 31 minutes on one day. It All Starts with Play! asks for ten years of sustained, structural change. Both belong to the same project, and both rest on the same conviction, which is that the conditions in which children grow up are not a private matter for individual families to solve in the gaps left by policy, but a shared public responsibility that we have, for too long, allowed to drift.
If your school, or your child's school, can find 31 minutes on 11 June, take them. Then ask what else might be possible the rest of the year. Ask the same question of your local authority, your MP, and the policy environment that has, decade by decade, made it harder for children to do the thing that every child has a right to do.
Protect play, protect childhood. The 31 minutes is the easy part.