Ben Kingston-Hughes (Play Expert): The Power of Play

In this episode, Claire speaks to the knowledgeable and inspiring play expert Ben Kingston-Hughes (Managing Director of Inspired Children Ltd) after his keynote speech at the Brilliant Boys Leading Learning event in Leeds. They discuss why play is such an important part of a child’s development and Ben gives some interesting insight into the effects of play on a child’s brain. Ben had always dreamed of being a teacher, inspired by his mum’s teaching of history, but he had quite a rocky educational journey. He openly admits to being intelligent enough to get through primary and secondary school, however, A Levels required the ability to focus and concentrate, which is something that Ben found hard to do (he later worked with a clinical psychologist to develop training on ADHD and found that he met every single one of the criteria for a diagnosis). Despite this, Ben ended up ‘scraping’ A Levels, and when to Liverpool Teacher Training College, where he trained in drama and biology. Unfortunately, the rules changed and so he had to drop drama as his major, thus having to solely pursue biology, which was very structured and did not suit Ben’s way of learning. Because of this, he couldn’t focus, didn’t hand in assignments and fell behind, eventually leading to him being kicked out. Not knowing what he wanted to do next, Ben signed up for an English degree, which was against everything he had grown up knowing, given that his father had always been interested in the sciences, but Ben found it amazing. He could choose what and how he wanted to learn, and he began to thrive. From here, Ben ended up applying to work at an inner-city play project; these serve some of the most deprived areas in the UK. Despite turning up in a suit (not the done thing in an inner-city project!), Ben was given a 6-week placement and 13 years later, with a degree and a masters in hand, he is still there as deputy manager. In the podcast, Ben speaks passionately about the need for all children, regardless of their age, to play, and gives key insights from a neuro-scientific perspective which will help all educators, as well as parents, understand the importance of play and the benefits it can have in childhood, in adulthood and even in future generations. KEY TAKEAWAYS Give children the chance to express themselves in different ways.Children need safe spaces to be able to express themselves and need opportunities to do this without the activities having an ‘end product’. It is necessary to try things and see what works for the particular children in your care; that way, all play can be inclusive. Recognise that children struggle with mental health issues.It’s not a case of getting children to ‘toughen up’; children need to be supported through mental health issues that are taken seriously, rather than just brushed aside. Nurturing, curiosity and play are polar opposites to fear, stress and anxiety.If children have been through traumatic experiences, or are encountering fear, stress, anger and anxiety for example, nurturing interactions, fostering curiosity and playing with children can all help to reverse damage done as they release positive hormones which counteract the negative biochemical responses to stress, fear etc. Children putting themselves in ‘danger’ practices using the systems needed for real danger.Over-protectiveness is actually doing more harm than good to children in the long run because children put themselves in ‘dangerous’ situations to practice what will happen when they’re in real danger; the biochemical systems and responses are used in this ‘safer’ way so that children are better able to deal with real danger as adults. In order for children to heal, the sources of trauma need to be removed.By removing stress factors, children’s brains have a chance to heal from the biochemical damage done by the release of stress hormones such as cortisol, which are acidic in nature. Imagination is key to play, and something that is unique to humans.Experiences such as foraging, for example, asking a child to bring something interesting, and then pretending what you’ve got is something else, give children the chance to explore the world around them but then take it beyond into picturing something as something else. This is key for other areas of development, and something which animals do not do. Everyone is creative and imaginative!Sometimes, as adults, we are made to feel not creative or imaginative and we believe the people who are telling us we are not but every child and adult has the capabilities! There is no evidence that giving a child negative experiences will in any way toughen them up.On the contrary, giving children positive experiences will improve resilience, confidence, well-being, mental health and enable them to cope better with negative experiences. EYFS and primary school should be about giving children experiences.This is not always providing activities with an end product; Sally Thomas, an EYFS consultant, said that education should be about creating memorable moments, and planning in ‘experiences’ can be a way to achieve this. Sensory play not just for EYFS!Sensory play can have huge benefits for older children, as well as teenagers and adults. When on break duty, it is important to know when to step in and when to step back.When outside, ask yourself the question: If I intervene, will I make play better for these children? If the answer is yes, then intervene. If not, then don’t! Look past the behaviour.It is important to see the good in all children and believe in what they can become. BEST MOMENTS “I just couldn’t focus. I wasn’t handing stuff in, I was behind and eventually got thrown out so my career as a teacher ended in 1991 and I vowed never to teach ever again so here I am, working with teachers!” “I spent a week dressed up as a superhero (one of the most amazing weeks ever)… I saw selectively mute children speak for the first time because they felt confident; I saw the behaviour of children that had been really quite challenging behaviour but for that brief moment, they were a super version of themselves.” “I started learning about neuroscience about four years ago now and it was eye-opening... It has become the fundamental pedagogy of my whole organisation.” “To me, neuroscience is not just about facts and figures; it’s ammunition – that’s what I use it for.” “We don’t talk about it [mental health]. It’s still a taboo subject… We are at crisis point.” “In early years in particular, our workforce is going through one of the worst periods in terms of its mental health ever. There was a study by the Early Years Alliance that showed that our children are struggling, but some people don’t get that. There’s this attitude, and it’s a horrible one, but it’s about that, “Oh well, they just need to toughen up,” as if it’s not really a ‘thing’... We know that there’s no evidence at all to support that approach; that actually being mean to children does not prepare them for bad experiences. It’s totally the opposite, but with neuroscience, you can actually show people and demonstrate that there are physical changes in the brain… We know that anger, anxiety, stress, fear - those negative emotions - cause physical damage to the brain.” “Now, when somebody’s saying, “They just need to toughen up,” we can say, “No. What they need to do is heal,” and it’s not just emotionally heal, although of course that’s a massive part; it’s physically heal the damage of their brain.” “[Jaak Panksepp] proposed a series of positive pro-social, emotional systems built into the brain… We’re not talking upper brain here; we’re talking the more primitive parts of the brain… The way it seems to pan out, certainly from observing children, is that the positive stuff – play, nurturing and curiosity – are the polar opposites of anger, fear and anxiety.” “Everything about curiosity is instinctive and natural.” “[Curiosity] is an instinct in the brain, and it’s a fantastic part of the brain because it rewards children with positive hormones. There’s a whole list of chemicals, but one of them I believe is benzodiazepines which have got a street value; you can actually sell those. They’re prescribed as an anti-anxiety medication… This is produced naturally when children play and naturally when children find out about their world.” “This is where the instinct to play comes from… What your body is doing… is trying to ensure that you survive as an adult, and to do that, it actually needs to test you a little bit… Because [climbing a wall] is a bit scary, you’re activating the very systems that you will need, many years later on, when you’re in real danger… You practise as a child, and that is why children want to jump off stuff; it’s why children will jump off one step, jump off another. It’s why they walk on beams. It’s why they pretend there’s a crocodile in the cracks: because their body is instinctively activating and practising with the very biochemical system they’re going to need when there’s a real threat in later life. The more we overprotect children, the danger is the more we take that ability away from them.” “Fight, flight or freeze: we have these responses and if you practise with things like ‘What time is it Mr Wolf?’ or the jumping off stuff (the things that activate that system) you’re more likely to default to the correct response for the correct situation.” “By letting your children climb on walls and jumping off, you’re potentially saving their life, later on in their life, and people never realise that.” “On Safeguarding training, overprotecting children is actually being included as an example of emotional abuse because it’s that bad for children and we do it habitually in our society.” “There can actually be brain deterioration from lack of play.” “One of the theories is that play, those instinctive moments of play, are an evolutionary imperative to create a stronger version of ourselves.” “If a child has been through those extreme situations, the emotional damage is mirrored by biochemical damage in the brain… We need to heal the damage and one of the ways we do that is actually to do the opposite, which is your play: play, curiosity, nurturing.” “We just want children to be children again. We just want children to have those experiences that we all took for granted.” “If you can imagine something as something that it’s not, well that’s the beginning of the symbolic representation of other, or the symbolic representative of something else. So if you want to learn to read for instance, you need to know that that squiggle is a letter ‘a’. It doesn’t look like an ‘a’; it doesn’t mean anything. It’s a squiggle, yet our brains, for some reason, are able to take that and say, ‘That means this noise, this sound,’ and I think it’s that moment of imagination that underpins every single other human thing.” “Where are the SATs for imagination? If imagination is as important as I believe it is, as underpinning everything else that we want from children, including maths, writing, reading… why are we not helping children to foster that imagination in Early Years and Primary?” “Epigenetics is the bits of your DNA that are not hardwired; they’re not set in stone and what we believe now is that experiences can ‘switch on’ and ‘switch off’ certain sections of the DNA in a child… When you work with children, you’re not just affecting that child… you’re actually affecting, on a genetic level, the unborn child of the children you’re working with… If you treat a child well, if you nurture them, if you make them feel loved and cared for, if you play with them, if you help them with their curiosity… you have then altered their fundamental DNA which they will pass onto their unborn children to mean that they will have lower stress levels, they will have a better outlook for mental health, they will be less aggressive, and not only that, but you’ve helped their unborn grandchildren.” “When a school is using keeping a child in at break as a punishment because they’ve misbehaved in the first lesson, unfortunately, that is setting up exactly the biochemical response to almost ensure negative behaviour in the second session.” “If we consider that the break and lunchtime in school is a key emotional resetting time, because if children are finding school time and the formal learning anxiety-making, they need that break! Well if you take that away from a child, it is soul-destroying and could be damaging to their mental health.” “When you look at current neuroscience, brain growth is experiential; it’s the experiences that children have that grow the brain.” “That’s what education should be about isn’t it? It should be about memorable moments, rather than about just knowledge for its own sake.” “I think, as a society, if we played more… our adult mental health would be improved, because it is a key balancing factor for our brains.” “Several times now, either myself or my team have had children who can sit next to us and talk to us, simply because we’re dressed as a superhero, and it only works if they’re a superhero, and we’re a superhero... You’ve got to be on the floor, engaged in that process, and only then will they be able to open up to you.” “It’s a crucial time in the day. I think if you get lunchtime right, it has a massive, knock-on effect on the whole rest of the school day.” “If you accept, like I do, that play is one of the most important, fundamental, developmental processes in a child’s life, those small amounts of lunchtime and break could be it for some children. If they’re going home and the consoles are coming on, the tele’s coming on, kept in one room or staying indoors, where else are they going to get outdoor play?” “[Play] is always seen as a poor cousin to learning when actually we know that play is learning and it underpins every age of child, every stage of development from brain development through to all of the emotional development.” “I know there are headteachers who try and make Reception more structured to prepare children for sitting still, listening, sitting at desks, but when you look at the brain, that isn’t how brains are designed to learn anyway.” “I think we need to invest more in Early Years… More now than ever, you need to get the foundations right… There is only one way to help children become the positive adults in society that we need and that is to invest as early as possible.” “A majority of the brain growth of a child happens before they’re 2. If you’ve had up to 2 where you’ve had a deficit of movement, a deficit of nurturing, a deficit of communication, of course there’s going to be gaps, so we need Early Years workers in baby rooms to be as skilled-up and as clued-up as possible; paid at what they deserve to be paid and we need parents educated.”   VALUABLE RESOURCES Ben Kingston-Hughes (Inspired Children Ltd)Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inspiredchildrentraining/LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/ben-kingston-hughes-285b3a37URL: http://www.inspiredchildren.org.uk/Information on IAPTs: https://www.england.nhs.uk/mental-health/adults/iapt/Early Years Alliance Mental Health article: https://www.eyalliance.org.uk/mental-health-and-early-years-workforceBooks by Jaak Panksepp: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/191935.Jaak_PankseppInformation on Epigenetics: https://www.whatisepigenetics.com/fundamentals/Gordon Sturrock and Perry Else study on play: https://ipaewni.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/colorado-paper.pdf The Teachers’ Podcast: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheTeachersPodcast/Classroom Secrets Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ClassroomSecretsLimited/Classroom Secrets website: https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/LIFE/work balance campaign: https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/lifeworkbalance-and-wellbeing-in-education-campaign-2019/   ABOUT THE HOSTClaire Riley Claire, alongside her husband Ed, is one of the directors of Classroom Secrets, a company she founded in 2013 and which provides outstanding differentiated resources for teachers, schools, parents and tutors worldwide.  Having worked for a number of years as a teacher in both Primary and Secondary education, and experiencing first-hand the difficulties teachers were facing finding appropriate high-quality resources for their lessons, Claire created Classroom Secrets with the aim of helping reduce the workload for all school staff. Claire is a passionate believer in a LIFE/work balance for those who work in education citing the high percentage of teachers who leave or plan to leave their jobs each year. Since February 2019, Classroom Secrets has been running their LIFE/work balance campaign to highlight this concerning trend. The Teachers’ Podcast is a series of interviews where Claire meets with a wide range of guests involved in the field of education. These podcasts provide exciting discussions and different perspectives and thoughts on a variety of themes which are both engaging and informative for anyone involved in education.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.