Democratising the Schoolyard

If you have a Student Council in your school, you can almost guarantee that the most common agenda item for meetings is yard time. Children have very strong feelings about the 40 minutes of play they get each day and they have demands! While I have been asked to install a waterslide almost every year, the main thing that children seem to want is variety… and football. The trouble with football is it takes up a lot of space and we realised that, whether we liked it or not, it favoured boys. We decided we should do something about it.

Not every school is as lucky as ours insofar as we have a reasonably-sized yard. At least in the summer when the grass area is available to the children. In winter, the grass gets destroyed and it turns into a mud bath.

We started thinking about how yard works during the COVID-19 pandemic, when children had to be divided into bubbles. For those of you that forget, bubbles were classes. Bubble were divided up into pods, which were class groups. In any case, different bubbles were never allowed to be in the same space so our yard had to be divided into 8 different sections because we had 16 classes and 2 sets of break times.

We had to be creative in finding 8 different zones and somebody had the clever idea of using the front of the school as a play area. We shut the front gates at break times and all of a sudden we had added a whole new play space for the children.

However, we noticed that each bubble followed a similar pattern. 75% of the space was taken up with ball games and was being played by the minority of children. The rest was used by the majority of the class.

Once the pandemic restrictions lifted, and children were allowed to mix with each other again, we decided to keep the front of the school as a play area. We also decided the time had come to mark out specific areas for ball games as there were balls everywhere!

With the space we had we zoned off 6 pitches for ball games — 4 soccer and 2 basketball and classes could rotate their use of these spaces. It worked reasonably well. However, one issue rose, similarly to pandemic times, the ball games seemed to be almost exclusively used by boys.

We’ve decided to create a couple of pitches that must ensure gender equality. We’ve also added some different activities in different areas, such as small Futsal pitches around the perimeter of the basketball courts that can be used for all sorts of games, other than football. We have small walls for climbing. We also have tyres and logs for free play. We also buried some tyres for children to play around. We also have a few outdoor rooms and a walkway for those who want a quieter experience of yard. We have painted lines on the ground for other imaginative games. And there’s still enough room for a good game of tag.

We also designated a specific area for infants, which is only for infants, to keep them safe before they venture off into the wider play areas.

We plan to open one of our outdoor classrooms, which is covered, into a games room or a quiet space, we haven’t decided. The main thing we’ve learned is to use as much of the limited space as possible.