Our research suggests that fully capturing the value of play might imply a need to pay more attention to the innate potential of the play sector by scaling up the approach permeating this report: to tell the stories of children’s own experiences and those of parents and others involved. Using storytelling as an approach to policy accountability or organisational practice might have been viewed with doubt in the past, but recent trends across the public and private sectors means that, increasingly, the power of stories is being taken seriously. A recent Demos publication on public engagement in the city of Glasgow, The Dreaming City (Hassan, Mean and Tims 2007), noted why this is an empowering development: the power to tell stories is innate –
everyone can do it, and it generates a type of knowledge that people can relate to beyond specialist professional skills or bureaucratic
procedures. Therefore it is particularly effective in its ability to connect with people generally, which, as the Conclusion to this report will argue, will increasingly be crucial (see also Simmons 2006).
The Dreaming City goes on to note that ‘recently, storytelling has been embraced and championed as the must-have tool in a wide range of fi elds, from savvy businesses to effi cient medical practices’. It quotes the author Annette Simons, who puts it even more strongly: ‘People don’t want information. They are up to their eyeballs in information. They want faith – faith in you, your goals, your success, in the story you tell. It is faith that moves mountains not facts. Facts do not give birth to faith. Faith needs a story to sustain it’ (Hassan, Mean and Tims 2007: 68). The rise of storytelling can be seen in this context, of trying to fi nd pathways to simply and honestly explain an increasingly complex, messy world. Fisher (1987) argues that this shift amounts to the
emergence of a ‘new story paradigm’.
Within the play sector, many organisations already use such creative evaluation and communication practices. Barnardo’s Evaluation of the Tower Hamlets Community Play Programme, for example, used ‘write and draw’ techniques, inspired by and adapted from Action for Sick Children’s research into healthcare, which argues that such creative techniques are ‘an accepted way of discovering children’s knowledge and views through inviting them to produce pictures with words and captions’ (Creegan and others 2004: 20).
Another good example is the Torbay Children’s Fund Play Roadshow DVD, produced by a group of young people, aged 9–17, who called themselves FUNK (Film Us Now Krew) and who were supported by participation workers from the Children’s Society Take Part
Participation Project. The DVD project looked at the impact of the Children’s Fund play services and has fi ve short sections: How has it made a difference?; What do the kids think?; Having fun; What do the adults think?; and What do the offi cials have to say? The children involved learned about the Every Child Matters outcomes by, as one of them put it:
playing games and doing silly stuff … we thought about how we have fun and how going along … makes us feel healthy and stuff. We made collages about the fi ve outcomes and wrote down things about the projects that were important to us … we learnt how to interview people and how to use a video camera. We worked on our own interview questions, all to do with the fi ve outcomes, because we wanted to fi nd out how children feel about things.
Reflections on value
The wider impact of using this approach with children was evident in the development of the Torbay Play Strategy: the mainstreaming of Children’s Fund play services; the creation of two new play development posts within the local authority; and in the securing of funding for voluntary play organisations. The use of the DVD to illustrate how children felt about their play services was hugely infl uential with
offi cers and politicians; as Steven Chown from Play England informs us, a commitment to the play strategy is included in the Community Plan, Children and Young People’s Plan and Mayor’s Vision.
Working creatively with children and young people to communicate the rich stories that already exist is proven to be effective. Such
techniques tend to be popular with children and young people also, as is evident, for example, in the many successful youth radio
programmes across the United Kingdom and the increasingly creative engagement with online media (Bradwell, Hannon and Tims 2008). Noted also was the eager willingness with which many of the children responded to the questions we asked for this report. The will to tell stories is innate. It also forms an effective way to access the wider public’s play memories, tapping into the fact that all adults, even those without children, will have play stories. Accessing such memories is a powerful way to connect with the wider public and increase
understanding of the importance of play.
The reporting and communication practices in our case studies vary; while some primarily (and with success) use evaluation and community surveys to communicate with funders or to evaluate services and improve the offer internally, others generate higher profi le outreach material to communicate with parents and children. In particular, Glamis, GAPA and the Cambridge ChYpPS have developed attractive illustrated material that tells the story of what goes on in their services in different ways. However, rarely are they able to develop a more deliberate communication strategy that informs the public not just of what is on offer, but also why this offer is important and what difference it can make. This is not because the knowledge isn’t there, as it is clear from our research that playworkers are instinctively able to observe and capture this potential as part of their refl exive
practice. It is, fi rst and foremost, a resourcing issue. As the play ranger manager of Wandsdyke Play Association in Radstock says:
I would love to be able to sit down and write down the stories I know – and there are many, about individual children and young people, about their experiences about how their lives have changed. I think all playworkers know such stories and it would be so motivating to make more of them. It’s fi nding the time really – and being supported and validated in the notion that this is a valuable way of reporting.
This response is typical: with stretched resources, the existing duties of researching and compiling data for funders is already a burden for these organisations. Therefore, even though there is the will, spending more time on an additional communication task seems daunting.
However, given that such narrative knowledge is already implicitly held by playworkers, making it explicit by spreading the stories to a wider audience would certainly be a worthwhile effort, and one that will appeal more to many playworkers than the predominantly quantitative effort often required of them at present.