From Access to Belonging:

Alan Herron CEO, PlayBoard NI

PEOPLE

The challenge is no longer simply to provide accessible play environments, but to ensure every child has equitable opportunities

Rethinking Inclusion Through the Lens of Play Value

Alan Herron CEO, PlayBoard NI

Over the past four decades, the play sector has continually challenged accepted thinking about childhood, helping establish play as a fundamental right while reshaping attitudes towards risk, participation and the environments children need to thrive. Perhaps it is time to challenge one more assumption. For many years, the conversation around inclusive play has been framed by the question, “Can disabled children access this play space?”. It remains an essential question, and significant progress has been made in removing physical barriers to participation. Yet accessibility cannot be the end of our ambition.

Children rarely judge a playground by how accessible it is. They judge it by what they were able to experience there - the friendships they make, the adventures they share and the joy of freely chosen play.

Playworkers have long understood this through the concept of play value - the richness of opportunity an environment offers through freely chosen play. Viewed through this lens, the challenge is no longer simply to provide accessible play environments, but to ensure every child has equitable opportunities to experience rich, meaningful play.

From the UK Play Safety Forum and Children’s Play Policy Forum’s distinction between accessible and inclusive play, to the ADAPT framework co-produced by the Mae Murray Foundation and PlayBoard Northern Ireland, there is growing recognition that inclusion is about much more than equipment. It is about creating play environments where children can genuinely play together and where difference has been anticipated through thoughtful design rather than accommodated as an afterthought. This thinking is now being translated into wider practice through PlayBoard’s Everyone Plays programme, recognising that inclusive play depends as much on the culture, leadership and staff confidence within schools and wider settings as it does on the design of play environments.

Across the play sector, there is a growing convergence around one simple idea: quality should be judged not solely by compliance or accessibility, but by the richness of children’s play experiences. We have become increasingly skilled at measuring the accessibility of playgrounds. Our next challenge is to measure the quality of children’s experiences within them.

Our profession has helped advance recognition of children’s right to play while transforming access for countless children and families. Yet our work is not complete. The next evolution is not simply creating playgrounds that every child can access but creating places where every child can experience the richness, spontaneity and joy that play has always offered. That is how we move from access to belonging.