Why children need more time to play

Play is vital to children’s wellbeing, learning and development – yet it’s increasingly being squeezed out of their daily lives. The Raising the Nation Play Commission’s final report, Everything to Play For, calls for a cultural shift to put play back at the heart of childhood and education. Baroness Anne Longfield CBE, executive chair of the Centre for Young Lives, shares the report’s recommendations

In June 2025, the Raising the Nation Play Commission – led and hosted by the Centre for Young Lives and chaired by the entrepreneur Paul Lindley – delivered its final report, “Everything to Play For”, following a year of evidence-gathering, visits, and speaking to children, parents, experts and professionals.

As our report made clear, play is one of the most powerful tools for boosting life chances for all children. Play is how children explore who they are, how they relate to others, and how they make sense of the world. It’s one of the purest forms of learning, joy, and connection, and boosts children’s wellbeing, confidence, and creativity.

Yet it is also being squeezed out of many children’s lives, at a time when many children are struggling with mental health problems, with obesity, with development problems in their early years, and with school attendance. 

It is tempting to assume that this is entirely due to the way smartphones, video games, and social media have become such a ubiquitous part of childhood. But games consoles and PCs have been around for years. What has changed is the increased prevalence of addictive apps and social media platforms colliding with a cultural change in how play is seen in wider society. 
This ranges from the “no ball games” signs in many public spaces, including many housing developments where children are growing up, to the ever-increasing number of cars on the roads, the rise in playground closures, and the increase in parental concerns about children’s safety. 

Shrinking playtime in school

Sadly, we have also seen a very significant fall in playtime at school over the last 30 years. Children at Key Stage 1 enjoyed 23 minutes less breaktime a day on average in 2021 compared to their parents’ generation in 1995. The average total time dedicated to breaktime in a day fell by 18 minutes over the same period for Key Stage 2, and 17 minutes for Key Stage 3. Play time is even lower once the time it takes to queue for lunch and eat food is included. 

This has happened at a time when there is overwhelming evidence showing how play is pivotal to children’s healthy development – their learning, health, cognitive and social skills – all of which help children thrive and be ready for school. Children learn more effectively through playful methods, especially outdoors or in flexible, interactive settings. Play-based learning can improve engagement, attendance, and teacher satisfaction - but is often not happening in schools due to insufficient teacher training and a rigid curriculum and accountability system. 

Indeed, just 29 per cent of primary school teachers say they feel well or very well prepared to facilitate play after their initial training, a figure which falls further to 16 per cent for lower-secondary school teachers. 
Playtimes which are physically active can also help children to concentrate better in the classroom. We spoke with children who talked about struggling to complete sedentary tasks for one to two hours at a time and that they found their movement breaks to be a welcome and necessary rest.

Over the course of the school year, breaktimes account for up to 22 per cent of time spent in school, yet there is no requirement of schools to have dedicated staff or a strategy to maximise the benefits of the time that children spend in the playground. 

Best practice from around the world

During a visit to Finland, we met with representatives of the Ministry of Education and Culture, and the Finnish National Agency for Education. They described how play is a backbone throughout the school day, as it is during childhood more widely. Guidance in Finland recommends that children should have a 15-minute break for every 45 minutes of learning, with studies showing shorter lessons with more frequent breaks increase attentiveness. 

In Denmark there is a flexible curriculum that enables more playful learning, fostering creativity, collaboration, and student ownership in learning. 

F We need the same cultural change here too, and our Commission makes a range of recommendations to boost play in pre-school environments and our education system. 

That includes school leaders, teachers, teaching assistants, after-school club staff, and supervisors receiving high-quality play training as part of their teacher training and CPD. 

We also call for the DfE to require and support schools to develop their own plan for play, which includes trained play coordinators and a recognition of the importance of play within the curriculum. 

Raising the status of early years practitioners is also essential to fully harnessing their potential for enabling play and encouraging parents to do the same. Working with young children is a highly skilled and impactful role, critical to their development and learning. This contribution should be recognised and elevated to the same professional standing as teachers. 

That means ensuring early years practitioners are equipped with the right skills and understanding when it comes to play. With the Government aiming to recruit 40,000 additional early years Practitioners by September 2025, the Education Development Trust stressed to us the importance of training that emphasises the value of play and the distinction between supporting and directing it. This is important when practitioners work closely with parents, helping to create “ripples of good practice” that reach far beyond the hours spent in a nursery or setting.

Play during school clubs

We argue experiences at breakfast and afterschool clubs in Primary Schools and in community settings such as holiday programmes should be predominantly play based. In schools, we also want to see the new National Curriculum include high-quality play-based indoor and outdoor learning in primary schools, as well as free play, and for it to set out how this benefits children, including after they reach school age. 

And we want to see primary schools move towards adopting ‘always-active uniforms’, in line with the calls from the Active Uniform Alliance.  

We also recommend primary schools have an annual ‘Day of Play’ during which learning takes place through free and guided play. 

We call for the DfE to issue statutory guidance to ringfence time within the school day for play during break time and lunchtime, so children have sufficient opportunities for free play, and suggest reinstating the 10 minutes to the school day, as called for by the British Psychological Society’s Time to Play campaign. The DfE should also make clear that the withdrawal of playtime as punishment for bad behaviour or for running out of time to finish classwork is not acceptable. Ofsted should include play sufficiency as a measure of school performance to encourage schools to boost play in school time as a vehicle for learning and growth. 

Raising awareness

We need to empower parents and carers to support their children to play, so we recommend the DfE introduces an awareness campaign for parents on the importance of play and how to enable children’s play as part of its push to boost school readiness. 

We’ve seen during our visits to Scandinavia what’s possible when play is prioritised. Boosting play here in England needs political leadership, national investment, and a strategy to match. That’s why our core recommendation is for a new National Play Strategy, supported by a cross-departmental implementation taskforce led by the Secretaries of State for Culture, Media & Sport, and Education. We also call for a Minister with an explicit responsibility for Play. 

When Ed Balls launched the 2008 play strategy as Secretary of State for Children, Families, and Schools, he argued that fun and exciting opportunities to play are at the heart of a happy, healthy, and enjoyable childhood. That argument is as true now as it was back then.

Now is the time for the government to send a clear signal to local government, schools, families and children: that play is a crucial part of its agenda to improve school readiness, to raise the healthiest and happiest generation of children, and to break down the barriers to opportunity.