Role play is a well-established feature of most early years settings and yet its importance is often underestimated, particularly as the misguided rush to train young children in the basic skills of literacy and numeracy impacts on reception classes. However, the Foundation Stage guidance makes clear the importance of role play for all children in the age range and stresses that it is a powerful learning medium for the entire curriculum (see box: case studies).
Curriculum guidance for the Foundation Stage states: 'Children learn many skills and attitudes in well-planned role play. It encourages individual and co-operative play and gives children opportunities to express feelings, to use language, to develop literacy and numeracy skills and to learn without failure. Role play gives children the opportunity to make sense of their world' (p31).
Practitioners, therefore, need to see role play as high-status and important in a child's education. They need to observe it, plan for a sensitive balance of adult-led and child-initiated activities and provide designated areas that are attractive, accessible, and in constant use. They should not see the areas as somewhere to play after the children have finished their 'work'.
Home role play is fundamental to young children's development, and ideally should always be available. Alongside it, settings should provide other changing 'scenarios' for role play, which can be planned to link with themes or topics. Having more than one role play area encourages children to make connections between the different environments (see Curriculum guidance for the Foundation Stage, p31).
However, opportunities should always be available for children to initiate play spontaneously and to develop their own imaginative scenarios. Practitioners must respect and protect this as a child's right.
Development of imaginative skills through role play is included in the learning goals for creative development, and it is possible to see in the 'stepping stones' contained in the curriculum some of the many ways in which children develop these imaginative skills and dispositions. Fundamental to this development is the movement from parallel to co-operative play, and using objects symbolically as they re-enact their first-hand experiences.
For some children, who are perhaps withdrawn or having difficulties settling, role play may be the area in which they first find their 'voice' in the setting. It is not uncommon to see a child who is generally shy and quietly spoken engage in home corner play and become very vocal, loudly berating the dolls for bad behaviour or organising others in an elaborate tea-time drama (see box: case studies).
The opportunity to explore their experiences of family life, sibling rivalry, love and attachment, separation, fear, anxiety, and their experiences of the wider world in a safe, small-scale (and sometimes enclosed) environment plays an important part in the development of a young child's emotional well being.
As so much of a young child's learning is consolidated by mimicking adults and re-enacting previous experiences, it is in the home corner that much of their learning about family life and social interaction will be explored and consolidated.
Some children will be observed choosing to spend a great deal of their time engaging in role play, either in the home corner or in fantasy or imaginative play, and practitioners must draw on this information to plan appropriately to meet the child's emotional needs and sensitively move the children forward in their development.
It is important that practitioners learn how to recognise the difference between free-flowing fantasy play that enables children to explore their concerns and interests, and role play that is stuck at an imitative level.
Literacy and numeracy
Many Foundation Stage practitioners continue to be worried about meeting the requirements for literacy and numeracy hours in the reception class, when indeed it is not compulsory to do either.
In fact, imaginative and home role play provides countless opportunities for literacy and numeracy exploration, and plans, observations and assessments can provide evidence of this (see p18).
Dispositions
Practitioners should also be constantly aware of dispositions to learning, which, as Lillian Katz explains, 'are a very different type of learning from skills and knowledge. They can be thought of as habits of mind, tendencies to respond to situations in certain ways. Curiosity is a disposition. It's not a skill, and it's not a piece of knowledge. It's a tendency to respond to your experience in a certain way. Friendliness is a disposition. Unfriendliness is a disposition. Creativity is perhaps a set of dispositions. Being bossy or a bully are dispositions. Not all dispositions are desirable.' (In American Educator, summer 1988).
There is a very clear danger that in the process of instructing young children very early with 'academic' knowledge and skills, we damage the development of the very dispositions required to use those skills - the disposition to 'want to learn' is destroyed. For example, it is the difference between having reading skills and having the disposition to be a reader.
Role play offers the child an arena in which many desirable dispositions can be promoted and developed - interest, imagination, co-operation, friendliness, curiosity, resourcefulness, perseverance, creativity. It is also where undesirable dispositions will come to the fore, for example, bossiness, bullying, passivity or destructiveness; but it provides a safe place where they can be challenged and constructively adapted. Dispositions are probably best learned by being around people who exhibit them and having the opportunities to behave in the same way, so the behaviour can be responded to.
Beyond the foundation stage
Many practitioners working with four-and five-year-olds feel pressured by other staff and management to 'train' them to be 'ready' for the national curriculum and sadly, much good practice in early years is not valued by the rest of the primary sector. It is vital that information and training for areas such as role play is disseminated among all management and governing bodies and staff.
Practitioners need to be clear about the educational validity of role play, in order not merely to justify it in the early years but also to raise awareness of its continuing importance throughout a child's education. We all know that when older children visit a nursery or reception class, they make straight for the outdoors, the sand and water trays and the home corner. These are all the areas they are denied as they progress through primary school. Yet our knowledge of physical, social and emotional development tells us that not all needs have been met by the time a child leaves a reception class.
