This book provides you with all the underpinning knowledge for the S/NVQ in Playwork Level 2. Written by experienced Playwork tutors and assessors who have helped candidates achieve their S/NVQ award, it provides everything students need to support their practical work with children and young people. Full coverage of the 2002 standards.

Approved by SPRITO, this text is fully revised throughout to reflect the latest thinking and practice, and is based upon the National Occupational Standards.

Written with the aim of giving candidates everything needed to complete the S/NVQ award successfully, this work contains nine mandatory units. "Active Knowledge" sections in each unit encourage candidates to relate theory to their own practical experience.

Playwork in Practice introduces the ways that playwork can be used across the children's workforce, including carers, qualified teachers, parents and other adults. You will learn the theoretical and practical aspects of the playwork approach supported by a wealth of research-evidence, this book is for anyone studying playwork or looking to use it in their own practice. The chapters focus on the following areas where the playwork approach can be applied: behaviour, adult expectations, relationships and inclusion, space, environment and outdoors, age, risk, and resilience, emotions and resilience, health, well-being and gender. Using a reflexive reflective approach, the book offers vivid descriptions of interactions between children and adults in a range of different circumstances and analyses these interactions critically. Each chapter includes a real-life story with analysis based on the authors conversations with carers, playworkers, parents and other adults. The chapters also include reflective questions.

Playwork Practice at the Margins explores the circumstances where playwork practice intersects with practice from diverse contexts and settings, encompassing disciplines such as health, education, early intervention and community development. Each chapter focuses on a research project situated in a unique setting or space such as zoos, hospitals, refuges and rainforests. In these settings, the authors reflect on Playwork Principles and consider these in relation to the theory, research, design and findings of their project. By presenting research from settings at the margins of traditional playwork, the authors use shared values and principles to consider the significance of playwork when embedded in transdisciplinary work. The book is underpinned by a model of reflective thinking that is used to examine how playwork practice is intertwined with knowledge from other disciplines. With a range of international contributions from both researchers and practitioners, this is the ideal text for academics and researchers in the fields of early childhood education, allied health, community development and social work disciplines as well as human geographers and practitioners in children’s services worldwide.

This book provides a holistic overview of contemporary play and playwork.

Play is of critical importance to the well-being of children across the globe, a fact reflected in Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Yet existing literature on the subject is largely confined to discussing play from a developmental, educational or psychological perspective. Researching Play from a Playwork Perspective offers a new and exciting angle from which to view play, drawing on the authors’ own experience of conducting research into various aspects of this all-important and pervasive phenomenon. This innovative work will act as a compass for those looking to undertake research into different aspects of play and child welfare. Each chapter explores how the author has combined established and new research methodologies with their individual playwork approaches to arrive at emergent understandings of playwork research. The overall conclusion discusses directions for future research and develops a new model of playwork research from the four common themes that emerge from the contributions of individual authors: children’s rights, process, critical reflection, and playfulness. Examples from the United Kingdom, Nicaragua, and Sweden give this unique work international relevance. Researching Play from a Playwork Perspective will appeal to researchers and students around the world working in the fields of playwork, childcare, early years, education, psychology and children’s rights. It should also be of interest to practitioners in a wide variety of professional contexts, including childcare and therapy.

This book brings together theoretical perspectives and practical advice to improve playwork practice. There are chapters on the role of adventure playgrounds; the challenge of starting a playwork section in a local authority; and the value of networking.

Building on the success of the first volume of Researching Play from a Playwork Perspective, this book further develops the crucial research of playwork as an emerging and unique discipline. The first volume explored how an understanding of playwork theory and practice can inform research into children’s play. From the seven contributors, four common themes to researching play from a playwork perspective were identified: rights-based; process, critical reflection and playfulness. This second volume aims to explore these four factors from two angles. The first considers how four more playworkers have researched play in four different contexts: prison, gender and toys, in Dutch play provision, and in the area of autism. In the second part of the book, the four pillars of playwork research are explored by academics from other disciplines with an interest in playwork research. This will be of great interest to researchers and upper-level students in the fields of playwork, childcare, early years, education, psychology and children’s rights. It will also appeal to practitioners in a wide variety of professional contexts, including childcare and therapy.

Evolutionary Playwork and Reflective Analytic Practice will enable playwork students, practitioners and researchers to reassess the impact and purpose of playwork on children.