Bob Hughes has been described as a 'guru of play' and is National co-ordinator of Playeducation in the UK, an independent playwork agency providing training and research services. He recently visited Derry where he was interviewed by Children's Express.
| The world is like a big toy, and you play with the world in that way. |
Could you tell us a little about yourself and how you got involved in play education? I'm a chemist and a teacher and a youth worker. That was before I became a play worker, I was looking for a job as a teacher and someone said that there was an adventure playground opening in the town that I lived in and that I ought to apply for the job. So I applied for it and got the job, I had no idea what I had to do, but that was how I started, I walked onto an adventure playground one day and there were two hundred children there and I just kind of got on with it.
What have been the successes of play education so far? I think its been an opportunity for me to write a lot of stuff. One of the things about working with children in play situations is that adults don't know how to do that. Its not a natural thing. Very often its something you have to think about very carefully and learn, because if you're going to help children to play then one of the things you don't want to do is to keep on telling them how to do everything. You need to be able to stand back all the time and let them get on with their lives and one of the ways that we've done that is to write stuff that helps us to train one another about how to make sure that children have a good experience.
I know that coming to Northern Ireland has been a really good thing. I've been coming here since 1985 and worked in Derry a few times, and worked in Belfast and Newry and Strabane, and I've met a lot of children over here who survived very difficult circumstances, and that's been a very interesting experience for me.
From your experience, do young children get enough time to play and if they don't what are the main reasons for this? The answer to the question is no they don't. I think that one of the reasons for that is that there is too much emphasis on learning things that adults think you need to know and although that may be helpful in later life there are a lot of other things you need to know that only you can learn by going out and playing with the world. As far as I understand it, the way that children, and all of us when we were younger, were able to learn about the world around us was by playing with the world. The world is like a big toy, and you play with the world in that way. I think that one of the problems with the way we are these days is that children find themselves from about 8am in the morning to about 7pm at night either going to school or doing things for school, so they lose a lot of time by going to school. It seems to work out all over the world that most of children's lives are dominated by what adults want them to do and want them to be. The philosophy behind the work that I'm involved in is the idea that children are the most intelligent people to decide where they want to go themselves and it should be our job to help them to do that, not to tell them what to think and what to be.
How is Northern Ireland compared to the other places in relation to this issue?
I think that is a good question. It is a matter of degree, that Northern Ireland is not really that much different to a lot of other places. England has a lot of provision for children, a lot of adventure playgrounds and that kind of thing, but then there's a big population. Scotland doesn't have very much, Wales has an increasing amount, but I think that when it comes down to it, there aren't very many places in the world that do have a great deal of thought about children. It's beginning to change now. I think increasingly people are beginning to realise particularly in terms of play that children, that this is something children need as an essential part of their lives, like food and sleep and that kind of thing, and if they don't get it, it hurts them, so I think the world is beginning to change, but up until now Northern Ireland compares relatively favourably with everywhere else in that it doesn't do very much.
What can young people like us do to help solve this problem? That's a really good question. I need to be, I'm going to say the absolute truth, I've got a real problem with some of the things that have happened over the last few years and one of them, bear with me here for a minute cause I need to explain myself, it's about children's participation. I have no problem at all with children being involved in nearly everything that the adult world is doing, and one of the reasons for that is that adults don't do it very well and you certainly do it as well as they do it, but I have got a problem when it comes to playing and I'll tell you why. I think with all of the reading that I've done, that children engage and play with the world in a way that they're not thinking about it, they just do it naturally, and I think that's probably the most effective way for them to learn all the different things they need to know. If we start to talk about how do we all design the best playground, how do we do this, how do we do that, I think what that does is it takes the mystery and the fantasy away from being a child and turns you into being a design engineer, and I don't have any problem with that except I don't think that's what childhood is about, I think childhood is about being able to be a child and explore the world as a child and learn about the world as a child, not as an adult or as adults would like you to learn. In other words my preference, for what it's worth, is that I think children have the right to stay out of the adult world and be in their own world for maybe the first ten years of their lives, so they gain all the benefits of the way that human beings have always learnt about the world by exploring it, experimenting with it, and finding by trial and error what works and what doesn't. The minute they start to get involved in what I'd call an adult agenda, particularly in terms of playing, they end up not doing what they would do naturally but very often doing what they think adults want them to do.
Do you think the troubles in Northern Ireland have had an impact on how often young people from here get to play? I think it has. I don't know whether you've seen it, but there's a publication that was done in Belfast called the Cost of the Troubles study, and I think in a general sense, I read that and cried lots of times, and the reason I cried was because I grew up and my childhood wasn't easy. I had a lot of bullying and things like that, but it wasn't remotely the kind of life that a lot of young people and children particularly were growing up with in Northern Ireland during the troubles. Not only did they have to experience shootings and explosions, they might have had parents or family that was shot or injured, or parents and family that might have been doing the shooting, and they might have listened to the stories and would have been worried by that or frightened by that. I think that playing was very difficult in Northern Ireland for a lot of children during the troubles, not all children because I think it's common knowledge that the troubles didn't touch everywhere in Northern Ireland, but the places that it did touch it was profoundly disturbing for the children that grew up there. For example you go to bed tonight and you go to sleep and have your dreams and then wake up in the morning. For a lot of children during that period of time soldiers would have been coming in through the front door, guns, faces all blacked up, and getting everybody out of their beds and frightening everybody to death. Now I'm not having a go at the soldiers or anybody else, I'm simply saying that for children growing up through that it would have been disastrous. I think that the impact of seeing people killed, of the army coming in, the paramilitaries flying through the house and all this kind of thing, is very disturbing for children, and whether different political issues are right or wrong, it's not an issue for the children; all children want to do is live their lives and very often all they want to do is play, eat, sleep and just get on with their own little lives. I think that one of the biggest problems with something like that for children is that it completely dominates their space and the games that they play and it puts them in mortal danger. I'll just give you one example, I interviewed somebody that used to play, what was it called, searchlight, where you try and find other kids that are hiding with a torch, and where they were playing was a place where there were lots of soldiers who may well have shot them thinking that they were going to shoot the soldiers, so it was something that was a very dangerous thing to be doing at that time, but I think it did have a big impact on children.
You will know by now that there is a huge poverty issue in Derry city, how much an impact does this have on play for young people? One of the first effects it has is in terms of nutrition. If children aren't eating properly then it takes a huge amount of energy to play, and if you haven't got enough energy because you're not eating proper food, then that's the first impact. I think other than that there are probably lots of things that we could talk about, about not wearing the kind of right gear or the clothes that other kids wear or not being able to buy music that other kids buy and so on, whether that is a problem for play or whether that's a problem for children in a more general sense, I wouldn't want to sort of debate with you, but I think there are lots of things around the sort of strength you get from nutrition, also the space that you get in small houses. If for example children don't have gardens, if for example the house has lots of children in it, there isn't a great deal of space, that may have an impact. One of the things I worked on is a play project where there were a lot of children from Kashmir and Pakistan that used to come to the playground. There were lots of them in each house, and one of the things that I always tried to gear the play project to was to give them somewhere to go to be private, because one of the things they never had was space to be alone, and that seemed to be something that they missed and wanted to have a great deal.
What should our local council be doing to help with this problem? I think maybe a lot of noise needs to be made, which is being made today about how important you and your friends are to Derry. You're not just the future, you're the present as well. I don't think people should be investing in you because of something that might happen in ten years' time, I think you matter now, and if they're going to have a city that is worth anything it needs to be a city that can state first and foremost, 'this is a place where we put our children first', so I think that has to be in actions. Now what you actually do in terms of actions I don't know, I shouldn't come here and start telling people what to do and what to think. I live somewhere else, but I think there are things they can demonstrate to the children who live here to say, 'we love you and you matter and we're going to do all these things to show that we love you and you matter', and at the moment I don't know whether they do, if they do they're very unusual.
Can other people help too? Yes, the more help the better. I mean I made a mistake on the radio this afternoon by saying that making provision for children is cheap. I didn't mean it didn't cost any money, it does cost money, but in terms of what you get from it, it is very little money, and I think the more people are involved, the more people realise that provision for children doesn't have to be expensive. It can be operated by adults who are paid, but it can also be operated by volunteers. You don't have to have expensive equipment, most of the children I've worked with love playing with reject materials, cardboard and stuff like that, things that people throw away, and children are very happy building things, using things like that for creative materials, and it doesn't have to cost anything. The first play project we ever ran we used to go round all the factories in our town with a tractor and a trailer, and we used to go and pick up stuff from all the factories; wood, paint, paper and stuff like that, and it used to last us a long time, so the running costs of the playground were very small, the only expensive thing was me.
Have you anything else you would like to add? I've found it a great privilege coming to Derry and talking to people about this area and I think the only thing I can say is the biggest part of the privilege is talking to you two. This may sound weird but this is a first for me, I've never been asked questions like this and I'm really honoured to be. I hope it's useful, I hope I've said something of interest.
About the team
This story was produced by Grace Barr, 13 and Michaela Wilson, 13. It was published by Fingerpost.
