Author: Caron Carter

Children’s Friendships in the Infant School Context

[00:00:00] [music playing]   Hello, and welcome to Children’s Friendships Matter.  A podcast series about children’s friendships post-COVID 19.    In this episode Dr Caron Carter talks to Headteacher Cathy Rowland,  about the friendship joys and challenges that emerge for children, educators, teachers, and parents in the infant school context – reflecting on what we might learn from both practice and research. 

Here, Caron and Cathy explore the benefits of friendships, how schools currently scaffold friendships, and advice for parents supporting their children’s friendships from afar.

[00:00:57] Welcome Cathy to the Children’s Friendships Matter Podcast.  It’s great to have you here.

Cathy Rowland:[00:01:03] It’s lovely to be here.      

[00:01:04] I really wanted to talk to you because I’m always looking at the sort of relationship between research and practice, and that might be how research can inform practice or how practice can inform research, and I think friendship is one of those areas where there is a lot that we can sort of learn in terms of research, but also in practice.   Sometimes there is that-   It can feel like there’s a gap between the two and how we bring those together.  So I really appreciate the time for you to be here today and to have that conversation with us.

I think with friendship, things never quite run smooth so I am really looking forward to talking to you really about the sort of day-to-day challenges of friendships and I think that kind of as human beings we always like to be fixers and sometimes there is not always a quick fix with these things.

Could I just start by asking you to introduce yourself and telling us a little bit about your background and your journey in to headship?

Cathy Rowland:  [00:02:01] I’m Cathy Rowland and I’m lucky enough to be headteacher of Dobcroft Nursery Infant School.  I was actually brought up on the Isle of Man until I was 18 and then I moved across to do a four year B.Ed at Edgehill College, and then I took my first job in Sheffield, and I have to say that was over 38 years ago.  So I’ve been in Education, I’ve been in six schools across Sheffield – three of them as a head, and I’ve been at my current school 20 years, and I love it.

[00:02:32] Wow, that’s amazing.  Thank you.   So this podcast focuses upon children’s friendships and also, I guess, wellbeing – because those kind of go hand-in-hand.     What benefits do you feel that children get from having friendships in your school?

Cathy Rowland:  [00:02:46] I think that it’s one of the prime things.  It’s that ability for human beings to form relationships and to manage that, and it’s our role in the school to help them navigate that. I think sometimes parents think ‘Well friendship, that just happens’, but actually like all areas of development, a helping hand is often necessary and it’s one of the prime roles for us as early educators to make sure that young people are developing the right skillset in order for them to do that.

[00:03:19] I mean as adults, we know that sometimes navigating that isn’t always easy so why do we expect such very young children to be able to do that? And our role within the nursery and infant school is very much to develop and to support the children as they’re learning to get through what actually is quite a tricky thing, and to understand what friendship actually is, and also to have the skills to know that.

[00:03:45] I mean children, when they first start at our school they are still at the naturally egocentric stage and it’s all about them and learning how they relate and that toing and froing of relationships in to a friendship.   At first – I mean as a parent yourself, you take them down to the playground and they play alongside another child.   They don’t necessarily know they interact.   I remember many a time asking my children ‘Who were you playing with, what were they called?’, ‘I don’t know, I didn’t ask’, because it’s not important at first when they’re very young; what’s important is the activity, and gradually as they get older they know that actually knowing about that person and actually ‘I need to find out about you’.

[00:04:21] So Caron, if I wanted to be your friend, if we were friends, then I might actually need to find out what your interests are because it’s not all about me.  And young children, it is helping them to look beyond themselves, both supporting them through the play based stuff but also having specific taught elements so that they understand the toing and froing of how that gets up.

[00:04:45] And one of the key things that we also look at as a school is the getting on and falling out, because it is natural for it sometimes not to work, but what’s important is that children understand that this is natural and that actually they’ve gradually develop the skills to sort it out.  Obviously initially it’s with heavy scaffolding and support from the staff, but then it’s also thinking how they can do that, because sometimes they get it wrong.   And I think that is really important that our educators, both for the children but also for their families at home, that it’s natural to get it wrong and the younger you are the more likely you are because you think it’s all about you and it’s about learning and you make mistakes.  But actually, just as if you’re teaching a child about writing a story and they make a mistake and so you help them – it’s the same with friendships.  They sometimes get it wrong, and then you question them or you might support them so they’re ‘Ah, so if this happens again I could have done that’, because some children aren’t always aware of their affect on other people and actually what they did might have influenced what somebody else did to them.   They are not always aware of that relationship as human beings.

[00:05:53] Oh there’s so much interesting stuff there that you said.  Can I just pick up on a couple of points?  I really liked when you said about, and this has come up with a parent before when I’ve spoken to them about the idea of when you said in the playground you might play with someone and then you say ‘Who did you play with?’ and you don’t know their name.  I think sometimes that happens when children start school.  They might be playing with other children and then you say ‘Oh, who have you played with?’ and I remember a parent saying that they felt that their child was being rude because they hadn’t asked what their names were.

Cathy Rowland:  [00:06:28] It doesn’t always just come up.  We know, as adults, that actually the social convention is we ask, and some children do pick that up, but the vast majority you have to say ‘Actually you need to talk about it, or you need to ask them’.  It’s not them being rude, but it just hasn’t occurred to them that that’s an important thing.   And sometimes when they might come home and ‘Oh, I didn’t play with anybody’ and they come to school and you ‘Well yes, they were playing alongside’, and the stage of development they were at might have been at playing around as opposed to playing with.   All areas of development follow a natural progression and friendship and relationships is one of those as well.   Some children pass through that without needing too much support and many others need a little tweak along the way to support them.

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[00:07:22] Yes, so I suppose it’s kind of like we put our adult agenda on really, rather than think where are they at at the moment and if they haven’t asked somebody’s name we might encourage them in the future, we might say ‘Oh, well next time when you’re playing you might ask them what their name is and what have you’, but also not to see that as almost a deficit thing, but just to say that is part of where they are at the moment.

Cathy Rowland:  [00:07:42] Yes, and say your child was playing with LEGO, ‘Oh, they must have been interested in that, I wonder what they like?’ and actually is the name the most important thing or actually knowing-   As adults we like to know names but actually for young children they want to know about the game and sometimes when it goes wrong because say they’re doing roleplay and they both want to be something, it’s asking what would you like to be, where ….you story, and it’s about them understanding that for things to work correctly we can’t reach each other’s minds.  That’s really obvious as adult, but for a child it isn’t.  Because, well of course it’s obvious – because I’m really certain.  I know what’s in my game, and you’re supposed to just guess.  We do explicitly help children to understand that you have to read somebody’s body language as well.  You have to understand.  It’s not just want you say, it’s the tone in which you say it.    As an adult that still is a very useful skill, ‘I’m fine’ in my tone of voice isn’t the same as ‘I’m actually fine’, or am I hiding something in those nuances.  

[00:08:49] As you become older you become even more complex and layered, but actually it’s really important that children understand at face value what somebody says may not be how they hide it, and we help children to try and learn to read each other as well as giving the right messages.

[00:09:06] So sometimes, for instance, children might be playing a tig game and one of them doesn’t like it and gets upset but then you say to them ‘Well did you tell the other person you didn’t like it?’, ‘No’.  So how did they know?   So then it’s about saying give a nice firm sign, a visual sign – or in your tone saying ‘Stop it.  I don’t like it’.   As I said, some children are very intuitive and they do pick that up, but many others they just don’t and they think that the other person is going to read their mind – which they can’t.

[00:09:34] Yes, it’s so interesting.   And also that idea of kind of going through that – you said that work about ‘this is natural’ and I quite like that, because when things go wrong we automatically think, you know like if we’ve not told somebody to stop it, then that person who was playing the tig or whatever they were doing, then they will feel really bad that they’ve not picked up on that or whatever, and I was just thinking there’s that element sometimes where children can feel like they’re at fault.  Or because there’s feelings involved, because they don’t want to upset their friend, they can feel like they’re a bad person.  But also that recognition of no, this is natural, we are never going to get it right – there are lots and lots of things that we’re trying to navigate but that’s okay and you’re not a bad person.

Cathy Rowland:  [00:10:22] No it’s interesting.  We do something in school called Philosophy for Children and one of the things that you teach them is actually that it’s okay to disagree with your friend because at first children don’t want to think ‘Oh no, I don’t agree with that but actually you and I could be really good friends, but we don’t agree about everything, and that’s okay’.   It’s how you negotiate around that that’s the important thing, not necessarily that we have identical views on everything, because we’re not going to.  And children actually need to be taught that because quite often they do struggle with that concept when they’re very young that they think they have to agree with everything that their friends say and no, it’s alright to say actually I don’t want to play that today, that’s fine. Maybe tomorrow’, and that’s okay and how you negotiate that.

[00:11:03] But then also if you’re not playing with your friend then maybe you could help them find somebody who does want to play roleplay today, because you want to go and play skipping or something.   It’s how you support them to do that.

[00:11:17] I might come back to talk a little bit more about the provision you’ve had but you’ve mentioned quite a bit there, so I am going to ask you now about the impact of COVID 19.  At the moment there’s a general feeling of ‘We all want to leave COVID behind and not think about what’s happened’ but I think we can’t do that really.  I think that we have to be mindful of the impact of COVID, particularly for children who might be finding things challenging that they might not otherwise have had if we hadn’t had COVID.   And then also I suppose with COVID also, there is some positives to be had still from COVID.   So when I interviewed some children they had some real positive stories of COVID and how that had impacted on them, particularly with the relationships with their families and so on.  So I just wanted to ask you about that impact and what are the challenges now in these new times for children’s friendships and wellbeing?

Cathy Rowland:  [00:12:11] I think that we can’t underestimate.  We are all a product of whatever has happened in our lives and it was a major world event.  So if a child is now five it means that they were very, very young – they were still a baby, ish, or certainly very young child when COVID was going on.   And the things that they would have usually been doing, which might have been going for baby groups, toddler group or a music group or whatever.   Those things weren’t on, and not only were they not on, but their families were also not getting support, which is often why when you’re a new parent you’re getting support by going to these groups as well as broadening out, but also when you are very young and you go to these groups you have to learn to share a toy, or get on, or-   The noise!  If you bring a lot of young children together it’s just made.  All of those kinds of thing.

[00:13:00] And while it is several years on now, the reality is that that will have forged those early, early years for the children that are now in the school at which I’m head.   For some children they’ve managed to navigate that and get through that, but other children – we are still seeing a slightly higher level of anxiety.  Now whether that’s COVID or not, the other thing to say is it didn’t just affect children, it affected the adults that would have been in their household.   I mean it was a very stressful time.  People died.  There was a lot of stress around.  People were poorly.  It was a traumatic time.   People were trying to juggle jobs at home while also having children at home in some cases, or if they were accessing school it was different and there were gaps and all those kinds of things.  It was a tricky time, and therefore some of those anxieties are either what the children experience but also their family members still have anxiety and some of the separation anxiety when they first come in. 

[00:13:55] So we are still navigating that.  It is very hard to say that is exactly COVID.  All I can say is that myself and a number of other schools are still seeing a slightly higher level of anxiety amongst the young people that we support and I think that some of that is linked to the COVID times.

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[00:14:21] Did you notice at the time when children were coming back that there were any positives to that experience, or?

Cathy Rowland:  [00:14:25] It depends, because children had majorly different experiences.  So for some of the young people, I mean we never closed as a school – we were open, open in the holidays, so for some young people they were accessing it the whole time and so their experience would have been very, very different than some young people who were five or six months at home and so I think that there was a definite mismatch between the experiences, whereas collectively when you’re all in the same pattern you have similar experiences.  So I think that was very, very different.

[00:14:55] I suppose it might have been different for those people that they were having access in their COVID bubble if they had a couple of siblings and you’re still getting on and playing but if you were an only child or you don’t have those other links you may not have seen another child.   I can think of one family who told us that their child hadn’t really played with another child for a year, and that’s significant.   So they were used to a lot of adult attention, which is great, and that is a plus because they got a lot from that and they got a really good relationship and I’m not knocking that but it also meant that it’s very different when you’re playing with an adult.  To go back to what we were saying – who can read your body language, who knows if you’re playing a game when to let you win and when not to let you win.   Whereas a young child won’t necessarily have that skillset.

[00:15:40] So I think as educators it’s being mindful that the knock-on from that time will be with us but our job is to take children as they are now and to run with that.

[00:15:54] And that links back to when I did a podcast with Alison Clark.  In her book she talks about talking to a doctor who said when children were going back to school, he said the thing that he would be doing would be prescribing play.  If he could prescribe anything it would be to prescribe play with other children and with friends.

Cathy Rowland:  [00:16:17] Absolutely, and it is those negotiation skills and it’s the ability to-  I work better in a team than I do individually and it’s that nuance and if you went out at a lunchtime and you see them with loose parts and they’re making stuff and ‘Ooh, they’re watching that, I will put something down now and do something’, and it’s that sort of collaborative kind of play which is so important for building up those skills that some young people got but some didn’t.   Obviously I am very aware that my particular school, you know, many of the families would have had gardens and other things but I’m aware with colleagues from schools across Sheffield that some of that what happened in COVID would depend on the kind of house that you had and the facilities you were able to access during the quite restrictive COVID times.

[00:17:00] Yes, can I pick up on, you mentioned there the play at lunchtime with loose parts.   Could you explain that for the listeners?

Cathy Rowland:  [00:17:09] Oh right, so loose parts we use all the time with the young children.  I was just thinking because I was out the other day at lunchtime.  So it’s where you have a collection, and some of it has been bought, some of it is scrap materials, safe ones, and the children learn to collaborate and put things together and it’s where they’re in a sense in charge of their play and they are able to take it where their imagination takes them, and obviously the role of the adult is to facilitate that, but also to make sure that that keeps them in a safe sort of space, because sometimes – for instance one of the things that they’ve got is crates that you might have milk bottles in.   Now the children love to stack those and that’s great, but then you need the adults to say ‘Well that’s really, really high now, but what do you think might happen there?’, because obviously I know it gets to a certain height and it’s likely to fall over.  But now actually watching something fall over is a wonderful activity, but it’s about thinking ‘Ooh, perhaps we want to knock it over there where the children aren’t, so we’re not going to hurt anybody’.  So it’s not that knocking those things over is wrong, it’s just that you need to be aware that you don’t want a child underneath that when you do that because children don’t always think ahead about what may happen.  

[00:18:17] So it’s a range of things.  So it’s crates, it’s wood, it’s material, it’s all sorts of things which we buy in some of it and we look to try and source through recycling and those kinds of things, and it’s amazing what the children will create.

[00:18:33] That’s great, and I suppose they can use that in an imaginative way and make the objects be whatever they want.

Cathy Rowland:  [00:18:38] The younger they are the more a lot of their learning is play-based but obviously it’s our role as adults to make sure that there is a challenge in there and we can take it to the highest level and quality that it can be.

[00:18:52] Yes, that is really interesting, and I always think that play is so important to friendship.  So those opportunities at playtime and lunchtime are quite key aren’t they really when you think that once children go in to Y1 and there is more of a sort of formal approach and more of a focus academically, I guess those times become even more important would you say?

Cathy Rowland:  [00:19:18] I think that you have more of that play base activity in foundation, so it is just how things are, but obviously yeah, as you move through the school it does become more focused within the taught lessons although obviously I think so much learning is taking place through the play based activities.   It’s about making sure it’s got a step on, but also that you’re checking that children are extending it themselves.  For instance with roleplay it’s checking that the children aren’t falling in to gender stereotypes, so therefore you might add material so the children can try out different things.  It’s really important that we’re doing that.

[00:19:53] Children can take the play where they want to, but also then also suggesting other ways that you might take the play options.

Cathy Rowland:  [00:19:58] Suggesting other ways, and sometimes provocation and putting new stuff in which automatically then might help them to go in a different way.   And it’s making sure – so for instance one of our year groups has got a high percentage of boys and all the boys were physical, so it’s making sure that we had even more of a range.  It’s important for all children to do physical stuff but it was even more important that there was the room and space to do that, so adjusting the space and the way it was set up slightly to facilitate and to make sure that they could get in to the activities that they wanted to.

[00:20:33] Really useful to hear about how those adaptions are made for different cohorts and what’s needed.

Cathy Rowland:  [00:20:39] So, for instance, more of the boys naturally wouldn’t have gone to say pen and paper things in their play base, but putting within the construction area, which more of the boys might have gone to, then you are getting what you want but in a way that you’re going to latch on to their interests as well, but it’s also making sure that they don’t get stuck within those interests and over time they are accessing all of the areas.  Because we’re hopefully developing rounded individuals and to do that they need to access all of the different elements.

[00:21:11] Yes, that is really interesting, yes.

Cathy Rowland:  [00:21:16] If they’re developing, for instance, their gross motor by hauling some of the little tyres that we’ve got and the other things around actually developing gross motor, when they then come to do the more formalised where they are recording and they’ve got their pencil with them and all the other things, actually they will have the better core and therefore they will be able to write more confidently and with better skill.  So all these things interlink and it’s our job as educators to make sure that we’re providing for that.

[00:21:42] And going back to the friendship bit and the social bit, it’s really important though that children can get along because one of the biggest life skills I think, and it’s interesting because a lot of adults go on and they’re working from home and things, but you still need to be able to relate, it’s just that it’s in an online thing, and that in itself is one of the things that we do teach.  We talk about online safety but we also talk about the way that you treat people online should be absolutely the same as you’re treating them in person.  So respect, and sometimes even some of the adults forget that online, the way that you treat people should be appropriate, the same as it would be if it was in person.

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[00:22:24] I was just going to ask you about what teachers and educators can do to support children’s friendships and wellbeing going forward, but I think that you’re saying a lot of those things now.  And I think the online thing is really important isn’t it.  The online friendship, because so many children now are sort of gaming on headsets with friends and doing things like that, and I think that there is sort of almost like-   And particularly when they get in to the teenage years, they have almost got a group of in-person friends and then a group of online friends, and they might overlap or they might be different.

Cathy Rowlan:  Absolutely, but then also fundamentally it’s about that safety number as well as knowing that not everybody is as they seem and do a lot of work on that so that they understand about not giving personal details and that actually people can impersonate people.  It’s all those kinds of things but actually it’s never been more important that people have got that, that young people have got those skills because so much of their lives, and certainly one they get in to teenagerhood is online that they need to understand.   And they need to understand that     just because somebody has got a thousand likes on something, it doesn’t mean to say that they are her actual friends.  What is a friend?  It’s a really interesting concept, isn’t it.  You might have the same interest as somebody but that doesn’t necessarily make you a friend.

[00:23:41] I’m old so I’m still on Facebook, because apparently that’s for older people, but I’ve got some people on there who are very much my friends and who are very much my family, but I’ve got others who are – they are classed as a fiend on Facebook terms, but actually they’re not somebody who if I ever needed to talk about something really personal that I would necessarily ring up.   But there are different kinds of friends, different levels of that intimacy of being able to discuss things and those nuances between that it’s really important for children to understand, particularly when you’re navigating the online world that actually you need to be careful about what you’re sending, printing, talking about – because you don’t actually know where that’s going if you’re not in the room with that person.

[00:24:23] Yes, and I think that is really good that schools are doing that now and are sort of guiding and supporting children in those areas.  I think at one point there was a bit of, you know, parents just felt like they had to stop children from going online, or don’t let them do things or-   And I know that of course there are lots of things where there are age ratings and children shouldn’t go on them before that age, but also we’ve got to also prepare them for the world that they’re going to be in, haven’t we really.

Cathy Rowland:  [00:24:50] I think so, and as educators everything changes so quickly and it’s really important that we are almost one step ahead because a lot of these games that we’ve designed for younger people, actually there is an element to them where you can talk to somebody, and that could be somebody – it could also be somebody that you don’t want them to be talking to but you need to understand what those games can do before you let your child on them, and there are often ways you can stop certain elements of that game, you can shut that down and if that’s what you want to do, depending on the age of your child, and not just the age of your child but the maturity.   Because that’s the thing.  Different children will have, just as we’ve said with learning to read, some children learn quickly and some take a bit longer and it’s the same with their friendship things.  And actually, if you know your child is a little bit immature then it might be that you as a parent make the decision to wait a little bit longer before you allow them that.  Or you keep them even more supervised and you say ‘Oh, you can do that, but come and do that in the room where I’m at’ and then you can keep a closer eye on them.  It is about knowing your child and where they are in maturity, as well as their actual age, and obviously in the number of children who might have special needs as well, it’s knowing what extra support you may or may not need to give to your child.

[00:26:06] I’m really glad that you’ve bought up the sort of age thing because it’s something I grapple with really, because I feel like we’ve definitely got a system where by this age you have to be able to do this, and by this age you should be able to do that.   I think just some children, for a variety of reasons, might not be there at that age.  I don’t know, to be able to ride a bike at 6 or something like that, and it doesn’t mean that they are not going to be able to ride a bike, it might be that they are able to ride a bike at 7 or 8.  I think sometimes we are a bit fixated on they have to do something by a certain age or else they’re never going to succeed in life, you know.

Cathy Rowland:  [00:26:42] It’s important that you understand what is the usual development, and also be mindful perhaps if the average child might be there, but if not then you as a parent might need to know that ‘Oh right, this is telling me I might need to do a little bit extra to support my child, how can I do that?’, and that is where any families out there, I would say go and chat to your child’s school and they might have some suggestions.

[00:27:09] And sometimes if, for whatever reason, they have not gelled with certain children in their class what we do in school is we then try and get them to play with different children and develop those friendships if they haven’t always happened.   Also it’s important to understand that the friend you are really best friends with at 6 might not be the one that at 16 you’re friends with because actually friendships, some of them stay all the time and some of them come and go and there is not anything wrong with that, that is the nature.  I often think friendships have seasons and some last for a long time and some don’t.  It doesn’t make them wrong, it just means that that was then and then things have moved along.

[00:27:43] That’s great, yeah.  And this is the next question I was going to ask you which you’ve started to answer, which is great, around advice for parents who were often trying to support children from afar.   So they hear things at the end of the school day and then they are trying to support your child.  I really liked that idea that you said about encouraging them to play with different people and it might be that you tried to play with one child and it doesn’t work, and then you try something else and then that might work.

[00:28:17] So what advice would you give to parents that they’re not in school and they don’t see what goes on, and that can be quite tricky, can’t it, as a parent.

Cathy Rowland:  [00:28:25] It can be, and sometimes how they are within a school setting might be as they were at home.  Some children are loud and some children are a bit quieter.  How they relate to different children, you know, what you see – you might only ever seen some of the other children say at a party and some children don’t cope well with parties and they go really wild or they find it just overwhelming, so you don’t see that rounded view of some of the other children as well when you’re trying to partner up your child and make friends and things.

[00:28:50] So I would always advice to go back to the school and say ‘Look, I’m trying to support my child with friendships,  ..and the other children as well?’ and they might say that so and so has got an interest here.  If your child has an interest in trains, so and so might have an interest in that, but you might want to try that.   But I would also say try it out, because sometimes you invite a child home and actually it doesn’t work, and that is okay and that is actually-   it doesn’t make either of the children bad, it just means that sometimes in that environment it doesn’t but those other children come back and you think ‘Oh my goodness, they had a wild time, they had a great time’ and you’ve got to try it in different things.

[00:29:28] And also, when you’re young you’re trying different things.   You might try ..you might try a music class, you might try football or sport and you don’t know what you like, and it’s important for children to try a broad range of stuff because they don’t know what their thing is going to be, and just because you like something it doesn’t mean to say your child is going to like it either.  They can be very, very different to you.

[00:29:48] For instance you might be madly in to football and your child hates football, but that’s okay, and vice versa.  You can’t force a child.  You can get him to have a go at stuff but actually you can’t force a child to be other than they are themselves.  So it’s important, and that’s the same with the friendship thing – sometimes, as we said about children like what other children like – as they start to get their passions in life sometimes they make friendships.  So if they start going to a drama class and that is really their thing, then they might start to make friends within that because they’re sharing something.

[00:30:18] Same as us as adults, we often have friendships with people that like the things that we like, and that is the same for young people as well.  So I think I would say to parents to get them to try different stuff, because sometimes children are nervous of trying new stuff, and it’s okay if it doesn’t work out.   That’s fine.  Find something else, or come back to it at a later stage.   But also how you ask your child can sometimes result in what answer you get.  So if you say what has gone wrong today then they will tell you, but actually that might have been 1% out of 99 that went really well.  It’s not that they’re lying, it’s just their perception of that because actually that 1% might be the thing that is the most important thing to that child that day, but it is only a minor thing.  The rest of the day might have gone really well and you might think ‘Oh my goodness, my child had an awful day at school’ and they could have had a wonderful day, but one little thing could have gone wrong.  I don’t know, their tooth fell out, it happens.  Their friend didn’t want to play with them that day and you think ‘Oh, my child hasn’t got any friends’.   Well they might have done, but actually I advise you to go and have a chat with whatever school they’re at and to ask them what do they see.  Some children might be really good within the class but they find the playground-

[00:31:27] I remember talking to one of my children and giving them a strategy because she could never find a friend.  It was a big busy playground and I said meet so and so there, and giving them a strategy for that – but it’s about hitting that wider perspective that I think is really, really important.

[00:31:40] The other thing I would say, and we do a lot of this in school, is that people are very different and that everyone has something to offer and it’s important that they value that and respect that and that some people will find things easy and some things difficult, and that’s the same thing for friendship.  So it’s that some children do get extra support within school for the friendship element and the social element and that’s okay.  Just as some children get extra support for their reading or their maths – and that is just part of that,  with what you were going to say, it’s that we’re all on a journey but not everyone’s journey is the same and they need to be aware of that and that is equitable.   We don’t all need the same support in everything.

[00:32:26] It reminds me of when my son was at school.  The teacher that he had when he started school was really good at what I called friendship brokering and I think that she used to almost advertise different children’s interests to the rest of the group and I think that was really helpful then because children then gravitate towards other children who they knew had those similar interests.

Cathy Rowland:  [00:32:53] And also how another child has navigated where they went wrong.  So we were talking about the roleplay thing and I was dealing with someone last week and both children wanted to do the same thing in this roleplay thing and I said actually why couldn’t you have two of whatever it was?   ‘Oh, yes we could couldn’t we’, because if it’s their game then you can make it as you want.   And they just said ‘Oh that’s fine’, and off they went.  But they hadn’t thought that actually they could both be the same thing because they just had to be a bit flexible with their game, and the reality is that some people find that flexibility difficult, but that’s something for those children who do find it trickier, we support them with.   That actually sometimes you just have to move around things.

[00:33:29] And there is some research out there that sort of talks about, you know when you were talking about activities out of school and how that kind of helps cement friendships, that might be friendships in school so that you see some friends in school and out of school, or it might be that you have a set of friends in school and you have some friends outside of school.  I was just thinking, and I’m aware that out of school activities are expensive aren’t they sometimes, but I think also often schools do lunchtime clubs or after school clubs and things like that.

Cathy Rowland:  [00:34:04] Yeah, we try and do a range of things.  We try and make them not as expensive as we can, but obviously all organisations have got overheads but we try and put a range of things on, because they are almost like tasters.   You know, if you’re interested in science there’s a science club and if you’re interested in music there’s music, and if you’re interested in yoga there is yoga.  But actually often, if you don’t know what that is and you’ve never tried it, you don’t know if you like it.  

[00:34:32] We’ve got a forest school club, you know, those kinds of things.  And it is important.   sometimes they don’t like it and that’s okay, but they’ve had a go at it but they don’t always know that until they’ve had-   And also it’s important.   We’re a three form entry and so at some stage in their primary setting when they get to the junior school particularly they will be mixed up and that is also okay, because actually you often in life have to make new friends and you might go to university or you certainly might join a job and you’ve got to be able to get on with a range of people and make new friends, whereas at school you’ve got all these ready-made things, but you have got to build up that skill set so then when you’re in the stage of life where you’ve got to go in to new things that actually you can get on with whoever you’re with, be it as a friend or as a colleague.

[00:35:20] And I really like that idea of people who are close friends, and then also those that are like connections rather than really close friends, yeah.

Cathy Rowland:  [00:35:25] Exactly, and we have all got different friends that we want to do different stuff and the level of honesty or something that we would discuss with them.   And that is alright for children to know that in terms of everyone in their class, you expect them to get along with, but they are not all going to be friends.   And also I think sometimes parents worry if they haven’t got a best friend.  Well actually lots of children, and obviously I’m at nursery infant stage, don’t have a best friend at this stage.  They flit.  They’re like butterflies and they flit around and it depends what they’re in to on that day and that is also many, many children that’s how they are.   As they get older that deeper understanding of friendship can often mean that deeper level of understanding and knowing that other person comes, but that kind of flitty bit is very, very age appropriate for a nursery infant school where I am.

[00:36:18] And also that sort of recognition that it can evolve, can’t it.  I know some adults that say to me, you know, they’ve got friends still from primary school, or they might have some friends from primary school but I also think as well that it’s a little bit like – it depends what stage of life that you’re at and what job you’re in or whatever.  it does evolve, doesn’t it, and you don’t always hold on to all of those friendships as you go through life.

Cathy Rowland: [00:36:46] And, as I said to you, friendships can often have a season and it depends.  So if you in your life go on and move around a lot of you change jobs, then some of them you will take with you and some you won’t whereas sometimes if you go in to one thing you stay where you’ve always been brought up and it might be a different level of that.  It’s just what life brings you, but you still need the same sort of skillset to either develop new friends or also to keep that plate spinning with old friends as well that you have to actually invest time with them.

[music playing]

[00:37:26] I am just coming to the last question now.   So would there be any sort of take home messages, questions or reflections that you would like people to take from our conversation today?

Cathy Rowland:  [00:37:37] I think that it’s just don’t underestimate how complex a skill developing and understanding what a friend is.  If I asked you as an adult what do you define as a friend, I think that there might have been 20 of us in a room and we would all have a slightly different answer and that’s okay.  But there are some commonalities and we need to help young people develop those, but actually that understanding will develop as you said.   Not all children will reach that understanding at the same time and it’s our job to facilitate that.   And I think sometimes it’s to be kind and understand that some children are not where the average child might be.   They will get there but they are just a little bit more behind in that sense and will need a bit more support in order to get along, but we need to be respectful of that and helping all the children to understand that it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon, and we are here for the long game and we need to be able to get along even if some children are not quite really up to making those deep and meaningful friendships.

[00:38:50] Yes, it’s just making me smile thinking about the sprint or the marathon, because I think I’d much rather do the sprint than the marathon!

Cathy Rowland:  [00:38:55] Absolutely, absolutely.  But that’s the thing you see, some people would love the marathon.  Some like that quick thing that it’s over with as well, but I think that it very much is that schools, most schools do an awful lot to try and support that social element.  In the early years it’s one of the prime sort of roles of educators to develop that personal development and we do so much more.  I mean I’ve been in education for 38 years and as a school we have never done as much as we are doing now to support the young people.  I think that most schools do a really great job, but actually we’re not always as good as we could be sometimes at sharing all of that with parents and things, so if you’re not sure what your school is doing then ask them, and if you are stuck on a thing then ask the school.  It’s not a sense of failure, it’s a sense of actually the school will be dealing with hundreds of pupils over time, some of the staff, and actually they might have seen something similar before and they might have a suggestion for you and they want the same as you.  They want the best for your child so work with them.

[00:39:59] Oh that’s so interesting.  And just to mention a couple of things that you said there, because they were really good points to pick up on: I think that you said about we’re here to facilitate, which I thought was interesting, with friendship.  So it is not always about sort of jumping in and intervening. It might be that you’re there, particularly if a child wants support – because sometimes they want to negotiate themselves and they want to sort things out themselves, so I kind of really liked that idea of the adults are there to facilitate that scenario and I think that is really good.

Cathy Rowland:  [00:40:28] So one of the things that we’ve got in our school is we’ve got in each of the classrooms a ‘put it right’ area and that is obviously when they’re very young we heavily scaffold that but as they’re going through when they’re 6 and 7 we want them to begin where they can sort things out themselves because actually it is normal that sometimes things will have gone wrong but actually as they get older there will be less adults actually near them and you want them to have built up that skillset that they know how they can sort things out themselves and talk through things, and that is a really important thing.  So that is one of the things that as a school we do because we think it’s really important that they learn the bumps along the way and how they navigate that.

[00:41:06] Yeah, supporting as and when it’s needed.   So that has been really, really interesting to talk to you Cathy.  Thank you so much.  I think that there is a lot to take from that for, well for lots of people really.  it will be useful for academics, it will be useful for teachers and educators, but it will be also useful for parents who want to support children but are not quite sure how to do it or what to do. 

[00:41:29] Like you said before, that idea that in schools now they do the most that they’ve ever done and I think when I was younger that sort of social and emotional, it wasn’t really focused on particularly.  It was like you could either do it or you couldn’t.   There wasn’t that support for it, so I think that it’s really fantastic that there is this recognition that this is learning and development the same as any other area of learning and development and that there is that focus there, so I think just raising that awareness and supporting children with what is a really, really complex aspect.

[00:42:05] And it just makes you think about a 4 year old coming in to school, doesn’t it, and all the things that they have to navigate and all the things that they have to think about.  It’s huge.  So no wonder they’re absolutely worn out at the end of the day, or falling asleep.

Cathy Rowland:  [00:42:16] Absolutely they are, because they’re having to, as I said, their natural development for a four year old is to be egocentric and to be all about them, and then suddenly having to deal with-  And many of the preschool settings will be much smaller, you know, they’re in classes of 30 now, and that is a lot of people to negotiate and realise that you’re part of the collective and it’s not all about you.   For young children that can often be one of the trickiest things that they find when they first start school that actually sometimes we have to do stuff because we’re part of a collective group, and it’s for the good of the collective group, not the good of individuals, and that is an interesting thing for them to learn.

[00:42:59] Yeah.   Thank you very much.  I really appreciate it.

Cathy Rowland:  [00:43:03] Not at all.  Thank you.

[00:43:05]    Thanks for listening.  For more information on Caron’s research and other podcasts in this series,  please visit https://research.shu.ac.uk/friends   This podcast was made possible and funded by Sheffield Hallam University.  [music playing]

[end of recording]

The Play Observatory and Children’s Friendships

[00:00:00] [music playing]   Hello, and welcome to Children’s Friendships Matter.  A podcast about children’s friendships post-COVID 19.    In this episode Dr Caron Carter talks to Professor John Potter who led the ESRC funded project ‘The Play Observatory’.  Here they explore John’s research using media in education to chronicle children’s stories, and the links to children’s friendships.

They also reflect on children’s experiences at school, being online during COVID 19, playground play, and the Opie archive.

[00:00:51] So welcome, John Potter, to the Children’s Friendships Matter podcast.  It’s really great to have you here today.

John Potter: [00:00:58] Well thanks for inviting me, Caron, thank you.

[00:01:02] I am really interested and looking forward to talking to you about your research.  I just wanted to start off with getting a bit of a sense of your background and your journey, I suppose, in to academia.

So could we start by you introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about your background and your role as an academic?

John Potter: [00:01:26] Right, okay.  I’m John Potter and I’m Professor of Media in Education, and the ‘in’ is important to me.  So it’s not media education, or ‘and’, it’s ‘in’.  So media in Education.  That’s at UCL, and it’s at the IOE, which is The Faculty of Education and Society.  In a previous life I was a primary school teacher and I taught for about 10 years, mostly in Tower Hamlets schools in East London, and a really brilliant place to work, which was extremely diverse.   Lots of children of different backgrounds, different ethnicities.  It was just a fabulous, vibrant community.  

[00:02:01] Prior to that I had actually started out as a trainee teacher on a PGCE programme in about the middle of the 80s and I had gone back to London to do that, having been at university in Leeds, and I really enjoyed that course.   And in those days, children were front and centre of what we were learning about and so on our reading list would be things like John Holt’s book on how children learn, and on how children fail.

[00:02:28] We had people like Michael Rosen working alongside us sometimes, coming in and doing talks for us.   Margaret Meek Spencer.  It was a very kind of child-centred education before going in to teaching and I think that I’m really un-reconstructed from those times.  So I despair at some of the things that are going on in schools but we’ve got great colleagues who are researching it and find out more about how children actually learn.

[00:03:00] Yeah, so that’s me.  And I got in to media in education really through an interest in literacy and in story-telling, and in recognising the many ways in which meaning making was changing at the time.   I became very interested in first of all technology in education, but when that took a kind of, I guess learning analytics and learning games turn I was much more interested in using technology and media for children to express themselves to make short videos, to make animations – and increasingly things like podcasts, and ultimately to research their own lives through using digital media.

[00:03:40] So that is the kind of thing where the job title comes in, which is Media in Education, and I took up a post at The Institute of Education in 2007, beginning of 2007, and I’ve been there ever since, teaching on MA programmes, supervising students, and when I can get the funding, doing research that interests me.

[00:04:06] That’s great, thank you so much.  Yeah, really interested in that idea about you were talking about children expressing themselves, almost like telling their own stories through those different mediums.

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[00:04:22] This leads me on to the next question, to ask specifically about your research.  I won’t pre-empt anything.  I’ve got a few questions to ask as we go along, but I will just leave that open to you, just to tell us a little bit more about your research.

John Potter: [00:04:37] When I joined, David Buckingham had a research centre called The Centre for the Study of Children, Youth, and Media.   and there were a lot of people that had previously been teachers and were brilliant researchers, like Rebecca Willett, Liesbeth de Block, and I met Andrew Burn there as well.

And so Andrew and David became my supervisors, and my doctoral research, which I was doing alongside quite a lot of teaching on the MA programme in Media, Culture, and Education at the time, my research project was really about asking, or finding out what could be done with video in the way of storytelling about children’s lives.    And it was very different in those days.  So we weren’t using tape – things had moved on from then, but neither were we able to just give someone an iPad. 

[00:05:31] We had these little Casio kind of hand-held camcorder things with a FireWire connection and micro DV tapes that you plugged in to the side and actually the performance of all of that was kind of interesting and it slowed things down a lot.   There are some things about that way of making videos which I do miss.  In particular the way that, although it was clumsy, when children had shot things they had to press ‘play’ to upload them on to the computer, but they were kind of getting to know the shots as they were coming in, rather than continually kind of instantly reviewing what’s available now immediately through a digital device, a more modern digital device.  

[00:06:11] So it was fantastically interesting and the focus of the work was in two schools and in one of them the focus was on Y6 children, thinking back through their time in primary school and going around the spaces and places of the primary school, and recoding their impression so their memories of school and the things that they used to do, before they were leaving.

[00:06:31] Nice.

John Potter: [00:06:32] Because in this particular school there were 28 children in Y6 and they were going to go to 12 different destinations, so the videos actually became a record of friendship as well.  And I was thinking about this in relation to your podcast.   It was the one thing where there was a lot of friendship as a particular focus in that research. 

[00:06:58] And out of that came the idea that in this school children were selecting assets and when they got to the point of editing they were moving them around in particular ways and they were curating an exhibition of themselves or their time.   Mostly, according to the brief, although there was one that was 17 minutes long and had to be reduced substantially-   Well I asked for between 2 and 5 minutes.

[00:07:24] Interestingly, in another school the comparison study was with children who were doing the same thing but they were mixed ages and they were children who, for one reason or another, had difficulty staying in the classroom so it was a kind of behavioural needs group on a Friday afternoon and so what they were doing was a similar spaces and places of the school and trying to find out about how they felt about it, and recording things that they were or were not allowed to do in school.  And so successful were they at that that the films were banned by the headteacher for being displayed to the school because they featured them climbing a tree that they weren’t supposed to, and stuff like that.  So I think I got in to some trouble myself for that. So we had to do a kind of more private screening in the community centre at the school, because having made them they had to be seen! 

[00:08:17]  But those were the sort of things that were early days of my research, and thinking about this theory of curation, which clearly needs revising substantially in the present moment, but at the time it was a very optimistic way of thinking about how children could be learning to manage digital assets and how to present themselves, their identities, their affiliations, their friendships, and their relationships to the spaces of the school in particular.   Things that they did in the playground, things that they did in the classroom, in the hall, and in other kind of secret spaces that there are around.

[00:08:53] There is always little interstitial spaces in schools, little bits of garden here and there, or the back of a building – there was a kind of drainpipe where we used to go and talk here when we had private things to say.  That kind of way of using the building and using the space of the building.

[00:09:10] Yeah, I think that’s really lovely actually.  It reminds me, that idea of kind of looking back on your journey or your school, your primary school career or whatever you want to call it. 

Alison Clark mentioned this on her podcast; this idea that we don’t always have that time to review or to look back.  I think that there is something really nice about being able to sort of spend time with children talking about that journey and, like you say, it might be particular places or particular memories that are associated with particular places, and it made me think about the more recent research that you’ve done around The Play Observatory, and when you said about working with Y6 children in particular, it made me think about going through that process of reviewing your sort of journey through primary school and looking at the memories, and then looking forward perhaps, and how perhaps a lot of children during COVID, who were in Y6, might have been during the first lockdown or the second lockdown, didn’t get that opportunity for that sort of almost like closure on their primary school years and then like you say, a lot of Y6s, it is about friendship, isn’t it.  And if you’ve got those friendships or you’ve even got just one or two friendships and then you transition with those friendships, you know, what a difference that can make.

[00:10:34] So I just wondered, and I know you didn’t look specifically with The Play Observatory around friendship but when you were saying that, it just made me think about the connections with what you did previously there on The Play Observatory and COVID.

John Potter:    [00:10:48] The Play Observatory was set up to explore children’s play, primarily, and friendship impacts on play as we know, and play impacts on friendship, and we certainly found that in an earlier project which I can talk a bit more about a bit later, but The Play Observatory itself was really about what was happening to children’s loss of amenity, their loss of social contact, and we were trying to advocate against the idea that the only thing that was happening to children was learning loss, which was a kind of prevailing discourse of the time.  And so we were interested in exploring the kinds of things that they were able to do, the kinds of things that they were not able to do, and the conditions of lockdown kept changing anyway, so that was highly variable through the project. 

But the contributions we received, particularly from children who didn’t have siblings, they were really missing that social contact and that element of playing together.  They tried to make up for it, as adults did as well, with screen games, with multiplayer online games, with sharing experience in Minecraft and Roblox and that kind of thing, but also playing Zoom games.  So there was evidence that they were doing that kind of thing in The Play Observatory itself.  

[00:12:13] but it wasn’t a primary focus.  It just emerged as a kind of oblique findings.  We were interested in other aspects of their play and how they were using their environment.   But in terms of friendship, one thing that we did notice that happened was that siblings had to play together where they previously perhaps were ignoring one another, or were really not wanting to play with each other.  There wasn’t anyone else around for some of the initial, harsher lockdowns so you had to play with your irritating little brother or sister or whatever and make fun.  Usually build a dean together, crawl in to the den and play and that kind of thing, so that was going on for sure.

[00:12:56] But the connection back to the previous work that I did, or where I started out, which has always been a constant has been trying to bring out as far as possible the child’s voice in research.  So that is what we were trying really hard to do in The Play Observatory, but it was by far the hardest aspect of the project because we were all working remote, remotely.  So we were working remotely from one another and we were working remotely from the children that we were working with, so it was difficult to say the least.

[00:13:25] Yeah, that is really interesting, because I did some research during COVID around how children tried to maintain their friendships.  Like you say, the different means they went about it.  Like you say, we spoke to children between the ages of 7-11 and they did something before, you know, they produced some kind of artefact and then we talked to them about what they had produced as part of a zoom interview.

But there are those challenges, like you say, in terms of voice and sort of online research – and we found particularly how if you’re going to research with children you always had in that almost kind of lead in time to a project where you go in, you visit the school or the setting, you develop some kind of rapport with the children that you’re going to work with, whereas online we found that was much more of a challenge in how you go about that.

John Potter: [00:14:27] Well it really was.  So we had a survey really, which was the main tool.  Because we were building an archive as well, so The Play Observatory was not just finding out about what people were doing, but it was constructing an archive for future generations to look back at COVID and what children were playing in the pandemic.  So the survey was really the main data gathering tool for the first half of the project and Julia Bishop, Cath Bannister and Yinka Olusoga did a great job of designing it in a very kind of child-friendly way with …. ? [name] [00:14:58] collecting archival information as well.

[00:15:05] And then Valerio Signorelli engineered it and produced a really brilliant website, which was easy to use and we got a lot of data through that.  So we got videos that parents and children had submitted, images, bits of text, and lots of contextual information as well that was gathered so as to create it as a searchable database.

[00:15:28] Then the main emphasis fell on qualitative, even deeper qualitative work, which was interviewing with volunteer families, so we put a tick box in the survey to say if you would like to talk to us some more about your experience then please do – and then we made a selection of ten families that were representative of the data and the population of people that were coming in and/or had created really interesting content.

[00:15:56] And then we interviewed them, and we did ten interviews in-depth on Zoom.   The Zoom experience was really interesting.  We have written quite a lot about this.   The reason why it was interesting was that we feared it would be really hierarchical and difficult to get answers and difficult to build rapport and of course it kind of was, but in terms of the democratisation of the screen space, it was really interesting because the children were the same size as the researchers coming across the screen, and as their parents, if there was multiple cameras in use and in a weird way the screen kind of flatted off some of the hierarchical business.

[00:16:40] Plus the children often had control of where the camera was going, or what the laptop lid was showing and there was one case in particular where a child with quite severe needs was really interested in being totally independent of what her mum was saying about her and during the course of the interview she would subtly shift the camera angle of the Zoom call.  And we realised that there were ways in which children could actually take a little bit of control of the interview situation in Zoom that they might not have been able to do if we were sitting in the same room as them.  So that was an interesting thing that had not occurred to us.

[00:17:21] You know that question that you often ask researchers what surprised you, well that really did surprise us, but it took us a while to get in to this, because we had spent such a lot of time, particularly Kate Cowan and I had spent such a lot of time in the previous project in the playground, building relationships, getting to know our child researchers, talking to them, seeing them play every day, morning and lunchtime breaks, over a period of six months.

[00:17:46] So to switch from that to being online was difficult, but we tried to maintain the same principles of as far as we possibly could, hearing the children’s views of what was going on, and that they had things worth knowing and they had things worth telling us.

[00:18:04] Exactly, and I think that was really important during that period.  Even though there were some challenges, I think it was really important to make sure that there was some element of voice.    And we were aware that we couldn’t get to all children, or that some children, we were aware, wouldn’t have had access to the internet but we still needed to find some way of hearing voices of children.

John Potter: [00:18:25] That’s interesting what you say about access because we were aware, and we have been subsequently, and we’ve been challenged on this, quite rightly, which is the kinds of contributors that we had to The Play Observatory, are not representative of everyone and they were people who had access digital devices and knew how to use them, and had the time to upload and fill in quite substantial paperwork, visual paperwork on screen, about the detail of where the things were done, how many people, what time of day, what kind of mood were people in and that sort of thing.   They had to do all of that.

So it’s a certain kind of person – I guess there’s a class issue here as well but it’s not actually evenly distributed across classes either, so it’s very complicated.  Whereas with Playing the Archive, the previous project, we were in a primary school.  Just about the most comprehensive range of people that you can have in front of you and we were aware that we were hearing from everyone, really everyone, apart from home school educated children and people who were not there.  But we were hearing from a substantially wider group of children about their play in that project. 

[00:19:40] So there have been efforts in Play Observatory as well to do outreach stuff, and I know that the Sheffield team did The Festival of the Human, and they incorporated some Play Observatory questions in what they did for that, but it wasn’t anywhere near the kind of range that we got in the Playing the Archive, we know that.

[00:20:09] What we will do is we will actually include any links to the Play Observatory research and the archive to this podcast, so if anybody wants to look at that or explore that further.  And perhaps one or two of your articles that are related to this.

John Potter: [00:20:23] Yeah, I can definitely do that, and perhaps I should explain that the whole way of thinking about children in this way kind of matches what the Opies were trying to do, so it’s important to mention the Opies really, because their work has driven three projects and counting.  The first of which was a Beyond Text project that Andrew Burn and Jackie Marsh did in 2008/10, that kind of time, which was digitising the audio archives of Iona Opie in particular and the Opies, for those that don’t know, were a couple.  Peter and Iona Opie, immediately post-war, UK-based, who collected games.  Initially by placing an advert in the paper saying what kinds of games do you play, and asking about them and receiving contributions.

And then by travelling and finding out, and after Peter’s death Iona was going around lots of-  and before-   was going around lots of schools with a tape recorder and recording things in playgrounds.  Clapping games.  Skipping games.  Rhyming games.  Imaginary games.  Chasing games.  All of these different ways in which children play and interestingly they were also challenging particular kinds of prevailing discourse at that point, which was they were challenging the idea that with the arrival of cinema and TVs in people’s houses, that children were not playing anymore and they wanted to show that the traditions of folklore of children’s games were still alive and well and so when it came time to do Playing the Archive, which was the second Opie project, again directed by Andrew and Jackie, I was a co-investigator on that alongside Kate in London, and there was a parallel team in Sheffield.  We were interested in a couple of different things.  One was what were children playing now and were the same kinds of ways of working with media to inflect their play-

[00:22:26] You know like building on the resource of a favourite TV show which they had found in the previous project, or more likely some social media influence on it and what was going on in the play that was interesting and again to challenge this idea that media drives play out.  It doesn’t.  It just changes play slightly somewhat, and the traditional rhyming and game forms are still there and you have to dig a little bit to find them, but they’re still there.  And children are still doing clapping games and running around the playground and doing all the things that they’ve always done, but in the years of Play the Archive, Fortnite was popular, so we saw things like the floss, and take the L and other dances in the playground.

[00:23:10] And we realised of course that probably most of the children had never played Fortnite but they might know people that did or they had heard of it or they knew that there were dances in there so they we incorporating them in their play and so that connection between popular culture with its tremendous reach and affect, being then made in to something new by the children was a way of challenging the notion that children are just screen-based dupes that only consume.  They don’t do that.  They take the resource of what’s on offer through popular culture and media and they make something with it, and they actively author new games and they make something.  So they are really people worth knowing about the ways that they express themselves using their resources and popular culture to make new meanings. 

[00:24:02] Yes, and that reminds me of the sort of William Corsaro, The Interpretive Reproduction.  Yeah, that is really interesting.    Thank you for that.   I went to that wonderful event that Julia Bishop and Yinka did around the Opie celebration event, which was really, really interesting to hear about those projects.

[music playing]

[00:24:24] We have talked a little bit about children’s friendships and obviously we know that’s not the main focus, but I just wondered, you know, when I did my research I found that in terms of COVID 19 in children’s friendships, some children still had some quite positive experiences from COVID.   Some children really found the online thing was great; particularly children who liked gaming.  So they would wear their headsets and they would talk to one another and they really seemed to enjoy it.  Also, we had quite a bit in our research where children talked about doing art with others.

[00:25:09] So the younger children talked about making comics or drawing on WhatsApp and doing like video calls and sharing their drawings.  Or they would have like a little WhatsApp group that they would start, with a drawing focus or some kind of art based focus.  And then the older children talked about they had been given art tasks as part of school, and then they often paired up with people or went online and talked about the art that they were doing, and that kind of thing.

[00:25:46] So it felt like there were aspects for some children where they found, a bit like you were saying, they are very creative and they find ways to sort of engage.  For some it was very positive and obviously the other side, for some it was very negative.   And there were scenarios from the other side really where we could see where children really found it challenging and felt really fed up because they couldn’t be with their friends and struggled to find-  You know.  They tried the online things, but for some children they just said it was really awkward on Zoom, I don’t know what to say.  It’s not like real life.  And when you’re in the programme the talk flows freely, but online it was really awkward. 

[00:26:28] So I just wondered in your experience of COVID, did you get that sort of positive/negative?  Did you get a real mix of things?

John Potter: [00:26:39] Absolutely, absolutely.   So from a positive point of view: different ways of using media, different ways of using play, masses of construction of imaginary things.  Constructions of imaginary dens and spaces to play, art workshops as you’ve said, families sitting down together and leaving the camera on and painting at a distance.  We found all of those things as well.  And one of the papers that we’ve written subsequently, and I’ve realised actually that we’ve written loads of papers and so I can give you lots of links.

[00:27:08] That’s great.

John Potter: [00:27:09] It’s interesting when you stop and count them up, but we wrote one called Lessons from the Play Observatory, which was about the amount of time that children had to make things and that they don’t have in the current congested primary school timetable.  It’s not a teacher-blaming thing at all by the way.  This is just saying that these are the constraints that come from all sorts of performative structures around the classroom.  So it’s not a way of saying anything disparaging about teachers who I admire more, and more, and more over time.  But what it is saying is that the people that drive education, that assess it in such a performative way, might want to consider the ways in which the school day could become a little bit more open to allow children to have more time to do certain things.  

[00:28:03] That was the big factor really, was that there was lots of time to fill and they still managed a real intensity of activity.  Media producers, for example, the kids that make films that they wanted to share with us; the amount of time that they’d invested in them and what they were learning in that, it’s just incalculable really.    It wasn’t an ephemeral or trivial activity.  It was really culturally important, but in terms of learning as well, and so we wrote some of this in that paper called Lessons from the Play Observatory, and that is one that I did with Michelle Cannon and Yinka and Kate Khan.  But there have been others where we’ve tried to make that kind of case.  

The negative stuff, it came out obliquely in play in concerns about the virus, in concerns about how people were feeling about each other.  So we’ve got a really famous video that has been widely shared now, called COVID Gone, made by a 10 year old boy, in which he describes his feelings about the virus, and about wanting to be back at school but kind of realising that that’s dangerous.  A lot of all of the things that he’s missing.  He made another video actually about his football club that he was really missing and seeing all his mates and all that kind of thing.  So we saw some of that.  And one of the girls that we interviewed in the ethnographic interview very, very clearly had not had a good lockdown at all, and she had no one to play with and had not enjoyed being online.  Just as you found, Caron.  So there was a real mix of positive and negative.  But the creative stuff, and the engagement with popular media culture was very positive.  

[00:29:50] And it was interesting actually that some of the prevalent discourse at the time, even from the government, was you should be playing more video games so you stay in with with your friends, and then the minute that lockdown was over, you shouldn’t be playing video games because they’re bad for you.   Well, you know, make up your mind!

[00:30:13] Yeah, that is really interesting around the sort of – you know, really, like to just highlight that sort of positivity and when you were saying about, it’s almost that time to be absorbed, isn’t it, to be really engaged with what you’re doing and not have to be worrying.   I think Alison Clark talked about this because of her work around time and slow pedagogy and, you know, that idea that she was talking about-  I think some of her take home messages in episode 1, she is really interested in exploring what affordances we can have from having more time, or putting more time to certain things, and what you actually get back from that and what affordances can come from that.

[00:31:03] So I think that’s really interesting that I can see those links from what you’re saying about. And it’s probably unusual, isn’t it, because in life, probably at school, but also at home I am always aware of this, that it almost feels like you’re getting up, you’re getting everybody’s breakfast, out the door, you know, ‘hurry up, hurry up’ and there is not this time to take time and reflect on things.  So it does feel very busy these days, doesn’t it.

John Potter: [00:31:26]  It does.  I really like the slow pedagogy movement.  I went through that period where my time in the classroom was coming to an end, just as the literacy strategy and numeracy strategies were coming in and I had a decision to make about whether to carry on in to management.  Actually one interview was for a deputy headship I could have gone for.  Or there was another one for advisory work on media and tech and ed, and that’s the route that I took and that led me in to university.  But one of the things that used to concern me about the literacy and nummary strategies, as good as they were, and they had some good content in there, was this idea of pace, pace, pace, pace, pace, which has only increased.   To the idea that instantly recalling something means that you’ve learned it. 

[00:32:16] And I’m not a psychologist, but I know that that’s not really how things are learned, by instantly being told something and then parroting it back.  That’s not learning.  That’s parroting things back.

[00:32:30] So there are lessons to be learned from the time that that they had to spend with each other in lockdown, where they went for walks, families went for walks and got to know their local area in a different way.  Hung a sign in the window.  Spent all day on a drawing to send to someone.  Set up a very complicated activity in Minecraft to have a birthday party in Minecraft.  All of those things were incredibly powerful and required a sort of self-directed slow pedagogy, and I’m really interested in Alison Clark’s concept of that and I think that we need to slow down.   Yeah, it’s just people who don’t really know teaching and learning have been in charge of teaching and learning in our country for such a long time.

[00:33:16] I think that we have one of the most politicised systems in the developed world.  Thinking about Gove and his pronouncement that we’ve had enough of experts – I don’t think that we have had enough of experts.  I don’t think that we’ve heard enough from experts in recent years, so it’s really nice that some experts are breaking cover and saying ‘You know what’s there’s more to reading than phonics’, and stuff like that.  And the evidence shows it.  And the evidence doesn’t back up phonics as the sole means of teaching and learning reading.  So yeah, those are encouraging signs I think.   Let’s bring the experts back.  Let’s be a bit more like Finland, as everyone always says.

[00:33:59] When you were just saying then about the literacy strategy; I had only been teaching a few years when the literacy strategy came in and I still have in my head 15, 15, 20, 10, which was the time thing.  So 15 minute start, 15 minutes with this, 20 minutes getting busy, 10 minutes cleaning away.  And I still have that 15, 15, 20, 10.

John Potter: [00:34:21] And I was going to say, there was a lot of pace, pace, pace in that.  But I suppose one of the good things about the literacy strategy was that searchlights idea.  So when a child is reading and comes across an unfamiliar word, yes, you can use sounds, but you could also use ‘Have you seen a word shape like this before?’  or you could also use ‘What is the picture telling you?’ and you can also use ‘What is the position of that word in the sentence?  Does it make sense when you make an attempt on it?’.  It’s not just about sounding out the sounds.   So there were some good things about it.

[00:34:51] Just another thing that really sticks in my mind, and I used to play it to students when I was doing teacher ed at Goldsmiths and UEL.   There was a clip in a numeracy strategy where there was a numeracy hour, and a reception teacher was talking to a class of absolutely bored- and it wasn’t his fault, he was just delivering content, as they say- and they were completely, absolutely uninterested and doing the Velcro on their shoes and starting out the window and stuff like that.

[00:35:26] And then at one moment he mentions something about Tinky Winky, right, and you can see – there’s a girl that just goes ‘bang’ and switches on, and starts listening to him.   It’s kind of obvious, but an important point to make, that just a connection to children’s culture, just a connection to children’s lives, it just opens up across that school/home divide or culture/learning divide.  Just knowing about some of this stuff and showing children that you know about some of this stuff opens it up in ways that are really interesting.  You don’t have to follow the script.  It worries me to think about schools where they have scripts.

[00:36:08] Yes, and that links in to sort of Liz Chesworth’s work around children’s interests.   Yeah, that reminds me of that, which is so interesting.

John Potter: [00:36:19] Yeah, it works great.

[00:36:18] Yeah, and I was thinking what you were saying about taking the path.  Do you go down the advisory role of the deputy head role.  I went down the deputy head role for a few years.  I had that path to take.  But then yeah, or takes full circle and then back in to academia.

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[00:36:37] I’ve just got one more question before our final take home messages.  So you know now we’re post-COVID, we’re in this period of time where there are things out there, aren’t there, like the cost of living crisis, children being displaced by trauma.  So what do you feel at the moment that children particularly need in terms of their friendships, or support with their friendships in these new times?

John Potter: [00:37:06] I think space to have friendships, places to go.  I think that at school it’s still incredibly important, and I don’t like the idea of there being organised playtimes.  I think that the playtimes that we observed in Playing the Archive are really special moments of friendship, and that did come out in that project.   So the ways in which certain people would always go to play with each other and to learn new games from each other, and then people would come in to that group and go out of that group again.  So don’t colonise the playground and playtime and take it over and reduce it to a mechanistic form of play.  Leave it to the children to use that time freely to form friendships.   So space and time to do it.   I think that it’s great that some children get to go to after school clubs and either school based or woodcraft folk, or scouts, cubs, that kind of thing.  I think that they’re all really good, but I was in Stockholm recently and I got shown around a place called the Kulturhuset in the middle of the city, and I know they have a similar thing in Finland.  

[00:38:18] It’s a place where particularly children who are at the end of primary and 11-16 year olds, which have got a really difficult time in this country where loads of youth clubs are shut down, and if you don’t have the cultural capital to get yourself in to an organised group what do you do? 

So in these Scandinavian countries they have spaces where people can go after school and hang out with each other and make things, or not, or just read or watch something or learn a musical instrument together.  And the space was absolutely full of people in between those groups, those groups in between, from the end of 11 to when you can go out independently age 16, 17.  So they had somewhere to go.

[00:39:08] I think that in this country, if we want to do something we should reinvent that kind of space, or borrow from Scandinavia more likely, and create some of these spaces for people to go.  Because I feel for children in that period particularly now, because they get told to just be at home and be in their home space, but don’t go on your phone either.   So you can’t use the phone, and you can’t go out, you can’t go to a youth club.  What do you do?  So if there was some sort of space for people to maintain friendships in that kind of post-primary and into early-secondary period, I think that would be great.

[00:39:47] I’m sure that there are such places in the UK, I’m just unaware of them being organised to that degree that I saw when I was in Scandinavia.

[00:39:52] Yeah, I interviewed a deputy head for one of the podcasts, and we were talking about playtimes and how some schools have reduced playtimes and that space and also I think sometimes there can be this, like you said, that structuring the playtime where there is particular games there, but sometimes it comes from a really good place, because children fall out, don’t they, and they have arguments with their friends and what have you, but almost a sort of-   They almost need that space to fall out with their friends, to be able to learn those skills of negotiation.  So I think if we can hold on to those spaces for play, and free play, where children have agency and I think that is really, really great. 

[00:40:46] And when you were talking then about the older children in that 11-16 space, again I was thinking how difficult it is, like you say, you know, there are places that they can go, but like the park and the shops, and then that’s when you get people saying they shouldn’t be hanging around there and they’re up to no good.

So, like you say, it would be really good if there were these spaces where young people could go that felt reasonably safe for them as well, to be and socialise with others.   And to make connections with others.   When we spoke to Chris Pascal and Tony Bertram, they were talking about you don’t have to be friends with everybody, but you do need to know how to connect with people, and I think that’s really important, isn’t it.  Yeah.

John Potter: [00:41:36] It is.  I think so.  And like these places were sort of like libraries a bit, so they were definitely what we would call third spaces where there was a kind of flattening of hierarchies but an admission of children’s culture in to them as well.  Some of the background music that was playing was self-chosen, that kind of thing.  

It’s unfortunate that so many libraries have gone to the wall, but I’m thinking about there are boroughs and local authorities that have preserved that notion of the library as a space where people can go and do stuff and be together, and I would love to see that return and be expanded in to maker spaces and stuff like that, where children could just drop in and make something after school.  It would be great. 

[00:42:25] Yes, nice idea.

John Potter: [00:42:27] I can dream.

[00:42:30] So, it has been really, really interesting to talk to you John.  I was just wondering now as a final sort of point, is there any sort of take home messages, or things you would like listeners to reflect on, or any questions you would like to put to the listener.  Anything you would like them to take away from this podcast?

John Potter: [00:42:48] I think an awareness that there are things worth knowing from children, and it’s worth trying to understand a little bit about their affiliations and popular culture and so on.   And talking to them about what they’re doing – not in a prying way, but in a way to actually learn from them.  I don’t want to romanticise childhood, but I do want to see it as a state of being and not to think, to quote Alison James in A New Sociology of Childhood where as a child the day is 100 years long and you are in that day.  You are not thinking about ‘Oh, I’m not something yet’ and ‘I’m not a grown-up yet, so therefore I can’t have opinions, I can’t have feelings’.  So being open to finding out the things that are worth knowing about children and then building on them because obviously the things that they say, yes, there is such a thing as learning and education, but if you don’t know where a child is coming from you can’t take them somewhere else.    The whole idea that you can impose a set of atomised facts and then get them parroted back is a sort of masquerade for what real learning and deep learning is.    So that would be a take home thing.

And welcoming the ideas of slow pedagogy, and also valuing play, as something that it can be ephemeral and nothing, but it can be everything.  So it’s having that openness to understanding what play is.  It can be actually yes, I am wasting time with this spinner because I need to be thinking about something else.  And then another time I might be making a cathedral out of matchsticks or something.   But play can be all of those things.  So understanding this spectrum that play has of activity, and valuing it really, and allowing children to just be in that space I think is an important take home.

[00:44:47] Yes, that is really interesting.  And I think all of those things that you’ve mentioned there are so pertinent to friendship.    So like you said before, in terms of the play being very integral to friendship.  Sometimes the slow pedagogy, or that space and time for friendship.

John Potter: [00:45:03] Yeah, groupwork.   That thing about children talking in class that is quite scary that some schools don’t allow any at all.  And obviously when I was a teacher there were times when no one is going to be talking now because everyone is going to be writing, but there are other times where that talking to each other forms part of the landscape of learning.   We know this from social constructivists.  It’s not something that is currently in vogue, by people like obviously Vygotsky and so on, but by explaining something to someone else, or working on a task together you both benefit.  You both learn something.   Even if you know something and then you’re telling somebody that, in rehearsing the knowledge you are also learning about it and constructing it differently.

So I would say that there is a lot to be learned from friendship about this, and thinking about what I’ve been talking about throughout, about play, children’s culture and media cultures – that is the kind of landscape against which the friendship figures form, isn’t it.  So though we haven’t in the projects that I’ve been talking about directly research friendship. Friendship is a very important part of it.   The figures take shape in there, against those backdrops.

[00:46:15] Yeah, and I always feel that.  A bit like when you were saying about the being and the becoming and that kind of idea of – and with friendship, I think that friendship does provide lots of other affordances for children in terms of learning and development.   But I also always feel like it’s so important to focus on it, because I just know that it means so much to children, therefore it’s important.

John Potter: [00:46:37] Yeah, I completely agree with that.  You can’t argue with that.

[00:46:41] You can’t can you.   Yeah.   That’s great.   Well thank you very much.  It’s been a real privilege to talk to you John and to hear about your work.   Thank you for your time.

John Potter: [00:46:51] Thank  you for inviting me.   Thanks for all your help.  Thank you.

[00:46:54]  Thank you for listening.  For more information on Caron’s research and other related podcasts, please visit https://research.shu.ac.uk/friends   This podcast was made possible through funding from Sheffield Hallam University.  [music playing]

[end of recording]

Children’s Friendships in the Primary School Context

[00:00:00] [music playing] Hello, and welcome to Children’s Friendships Matter.  A podcast about children’s friendships post-COVID 19.    In this episode Dr Caron Carter talks to Deputy Head Teacher Richard Owen.  This episode delves into some of the friendship issues that emerge for children, teachers, and parents today.  Why are friendships so important during primary school education, how do schools support children’s friendships, how is play integral to children’s friendships, why is emotional regulation important for children’s friendships, and how has COVID 19 impacted upon children’s friendships. 

[00:01:07] So I’m here at Monteney Primary School with Richard Owen.

Richard Owen: [00:01:08] Hello.

[00:01:10] So welcome to the podcast.

Richard Owen:  [00:01:12] Thank you very much, thanks for coming.

[00:01:13] I think listeners are always really interested in hearing a little bit more about guest speakers, so could you tell us a little bit about your background, your journey in to teaching, and your role?

Richard Owen:  [00:01:26] I was born in Sheffield; I was born in Stannington in Sheffield and grew up around Stannington and Rivelin.  I loved primary school, absolutely loved primary school, and I always had a desire to be a teacher, but I just didn’t realise it until I was about 22.  So I kind of did lots of other things after secondary school and I went to college and did things with art, things with photography and music and then my dad said to me ‘You need to get a job’, so I went in to teaching, into primary school teaching at 22.  I qualified at 25, and then I got the job here at Monteney and I’ve been here ever since.  So, I started in Y2, and I initially thought I was going to be a KS2 teacher and that’s what I was set on.

[00:02:10] I got the job in Y2 and loved it and I spent most of my career in KS1, absolutely love working with the younger children.  I love working with all of the children, but it really suited me, working with the younger children.  I started as the music lead in school because I had a bit of a musical background and I had been in bands when I was younger.  We were rubbish.  A few years after that I became the maths lead, so part of a leadership team.  A few years after that I became the assistant principal and then in 2015, I became the deputy principal, soon to be changed to deputy head; a change in the titles.  

[00:02:51] So I lead on inclusion and safeguarding, behaviour and work across our trust of schools as well delivering things like Team Teach and just supporting teachers, supporting staff in de-escalating behaviour situations, working on inclusion to make sure that children are getting what they need.

[00:03:12] Just when you were talking then, obviously this podcast is focusing around children’s friendships and it made me think when you were talking then about relationships and your role probably, and I might be putting words in your mouth here so correct me if I’m wrong, but there would be an element of your role that will be about developing relationships with staff and that as well as the children.

Richard Owen:  [00:03:37] Absolutely, yes, you hit the nail right on the head.  I think the key thing about schools, primary schools, any form of education – in fact society as a whole, is all about relationships and positive relationships.  Talking about the staff just briefly, I think that our staff team, we have a wonderful team here and that’s because we place a lot of emphasis on it being team [00:04:02]     You’ve gone around our school, and you get that feel of our staff team.  You’ve been in our staff room as well and you can see that it’s really important that our staff come together to be together so they can get things off their chest, they can talk, but they can develop those relationships with each other, so that when things do get a bit challenging, as they will do in schools, that they feel that there is someone there to support them.   So that team ethos kind of runs all through school.

[00:04:31] More importantly though the relationship with children is so important.  Relationship with families as a whole, with parents as well.  I think sometimes, and we can touch on this a little bit later, but the relationship with parents is something that you need to get right, because that really, really has an impact on how well the children do in school.  Relationships with the children – we develop those straight away.  So as soon as the children come in in the morning there’s somebody on the gate to greet them.  We try to know their name as well so they feel included.  

[00:05:04] I always think back to when I was a secondary school and something that still sticks with me is my secondary school was large, over 1000 children, and I was in Y8 at the time and the head teacher knew my name.  I was walking down the stairs and he said ‘Morning Richard!’, and I thought ‘How does he know my name?’, because I wasn’t – I didn’t stand out, I wasn’t in trouble, I wasn’t a high flyer but he knew my name and that still sticks with me now and it gave me that sense of belonging and that sense of yeah, I am included in this, they do know who I am!  And I think that’s key.  We need to know the children; we need to know who they are and what makes them tick.  And those relationships are just absolutely key.

[00:05:56] When you come into the school you can feel the welcoming feel. It’s just there.  There’s a presence.  And like you say, when we’ve looked around we’ve gone in the staff room and you can tell there’s that sense of wellbeing or considering the wellbeing of staff and I think that’s so important in terms of role-modelling for children, isn’t it.  That we’re not just thinking about the children.  We’re thinking about the bigger picture and the families and the community and so on.  It’s so important.

Richard Owen:  [00:06:24] That is really, really important.  The role modelling of emotional regulation.  That is something that we are keen to develop and something that we place a huge emphasis on.  The wellbeing of staff, I think that’s paramount at the moment as well.  With the recruitment crisis and the retention crisis we need to make sure that we are looking after our staff.  We’ve got a wellbeing committee at school at the moment.  We have access to listening services where staff can book in to talk to somebody and listen and they can kind of get things off of their chest.  We kind of pride ourselves in our door is always open as well.  So, we are all in it together.

[00:07:22] And just going back to what I was saying about the parents too.  I think that’s the same for parents.  The door’s always open.  We’re always open to speak to parents, open to help parents, the door is always open for the children as well.  Children are the most important people in school and so that is why we need to make sure that they see that everybody in school is there to help them.  We are all the same in that regard.

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[00:08:00] Just thinking about, again, going back to children’s friendships.  In this school you’ve kind of got nursery to Y6, so what age phase would that be?  How old would your youngest and oldest children be?

Richard Owen: [00:08:18] So the youngest children are from 3 in nursery, and the oldest children are 11.  So, you can see that there’s a wide range of interests that the children will have.  Having said that, there are things that the children do at 3, you will see on the yard, because we’ve got our imagination station where there is lots of roleplay, the Y6’s will engage in the same play that the 3-year-olds do as well, which is really, really interesting.  And that is something that we need to promote more and more.  Just the other week there were two Y6 lads who had gone to the imagination station.  They didn’t think that anybody was watching them and they dressed up in these coats and they were parading around and they were having the time of their life and it was so good to see.  It was absolutely brilliant to see. 

[00:09:04] We’ve been and looked at playtimes today, and you will see how relaxed the children felt at playtimes, how they were engaging with one another.  They were playing.  They were smiling.  And I think that’s one of the key things that school does.  It encourages that positive play. 

[00:09:23] Now the other way around, you wouldn’t want 3 year olds doing the interests that the 11 year olds have, so we really lose out, I think, when we move away from the foundation stage and that approach.

[00:09:36] I’m really glad that you’ve mentioned this Richard, because play is so integral to children’s friendships and children’s wellbeing.  I was reading something the other day from Blatchford and Baines and they’ve done some research on the playground, when we’re talking about playtimes, and they’ve been looking at a decline of playtime and they’ve looked at survey data over a number of years, like a kind of longitudinal study and what they were finding is that playtimes are being reduced, the amount of time that’s available for playtime.  And I was quite shocked actually, because I was thinking us as adults, we get breaks through the day and there is legislation around people have to have breaks at certain times but actually there’s no legislation that says children have to have playtimes. 

[00:10:27] So if a school said there’s going to be no morning playtime and no afternoon playtime that could happen, in theory.  There have been, in some schools, a move to reducing the playtime because there is such a lot of the curriculum to get through and that made me think about children’s opportunities for developing their friendships and most of the friendship development, particularly once children reach compulsory school age at 5, there is less opportunities to develop those friendships or to have free play to play the games and the things that you want to do and explore with your friends.  So I thought actually therefore from 5, if there’s going to be that reduction in play I just wondered what your thoughts were around that?

Richard Owen:  [00:11:17] It’s interesting, I’ve got a few thoughts about that.   The reduction in playtimes: we have reduced the amount of time that the children have to play but that’s based on our data in school.  Breaktimes in the morning, the children have 15 minutes at 10.15 to 10.30.  Just going back to your point as well about schools not having to give breaktimes.  It’s not in school’s best interests to do that at all.  Like you say, we all need a break, we all need to let of steam, and that’s the children’s opportunity to do that.  

[00:11:50] So they have morning break and at lunchtimes they used to have an hour, but we have found that there were more and more behaviour incidents in the last 15 minutes of lunchtime because the children had been out there for quite a while and they have been spending a bit too much time and things, they’ve started to fall out with their friends, and so we reduced that so that the children have 50 minutes now.  What happens is that they have 45 minutes out there, and then for the last five minutes the teaching staff go out on to the yard.

[00:12:24] So if there are any issues what they can do is help to regulate the children, they can help to sort out any of the issues, they can communicate with the midday staff.  So anything that happens on the yard doesn’t come back in to the classroom, so that the children are ready to learn.

[00:12:38] I think it’s also about the quality of the play as well.  No matter how long they have, they could have two hours.  If the quality of the play isn’t very good then those interactions aren’t going to be built and so you need to make sure that you’re meeting the children’s needs, you’re doing the things that they’re interested in, you’re putting things out there that the children are interested in and so you could use pupil voice for that, your school council, to make sure that you’re doing what the children need.

[00:13:06] In terms of playtime and opportunities for that, I think that play and social interaction and talk and communication is one of the most important things that we do as a primary school and I think that there’s been a move away from that a little bit, in terms of what’s happening in the classrooms.  So you will see how happy and relaxed the children were at playtime earlier.  We’ve seen that there’s been a rise in anxiety of children ending playtime and coming in to school.  Those transitions from play to coming in to do their traditional learning in school – because I think that playtime is learning too and really important learning.  We have a lot of anxiety around that and that is where you have your behaviour issues. Not on the yard, not at playtimes.  We see fewer and fewer of those.  There’s the odd thing from time-to-time but less than before. 

[00:14:28

[00:15:16]  I was kind of thinking when you were saying about the children are really relaxed outside and then there are some of those issues when you transition.   I just wonder whether some of these issues are because children haven’t had as much opportunity to engage with their peers.   We had this unprecedented period where children couldn’t be with their peers, they were socially isolated, and now they’ve come back and for some children there’s probably two years where they’ve got a gap and they haven’t had those opportunities and maybe this is part of children telling us that they need more of this, you know.

Richard Owen:  [00:16:00] I absolutely agree.  I think when we first went in o lockdown and it was restricted opening in schools then the first period of that I think was quite positive actually because there was a period of time where everyone was like we’re all in this together, we can all do it!  And people were making those connections on Zoom and it was great, and it was interesting, and it was something new.  Yeah, absolutely, it was a novelty.  But I think that as that went on it became something that people were over-reliant on.   Even now, when I do meetings, most of the meetings with external professionals are via Zoom.  I must prefer meetings when they’re face-to-face.  I think that we get so much more out of the meetings,  they’re more productive, and that’s what happened during lockdown.  Children didn’t have time to get together, they didn’t have time to come to school and play and they didn’t have time to just be out and play with one another.  They didn’t have time to go to parks.  All of the parks were shut down.  I remember all the swings being taken down.

[00:17:09] So a lot of children, we find that they struggle with their core strength, they struggle with their movement, because they’ve not had those opportunities to develop that by swinging, by holding things, by climbing, because they didn’t do that.  Because they had to be indoors.   Maybe they’ve missed out on those kinds of experiences.  Maybe that’s something that they need to do to emotionally regulate and they’ve missed out on it.  I think the increase in screen time as well is a huge limiting factor in children’s relationships.

[00:17:59] If somebody’s on a screen or you’re playing a game on a screen, or you’re learning on a screen you don’t get those social cues, you don’t get those interactions, you don’t read body language, you don’t read facial expressions.  And that is absolutely key.  That is almost a fundamental thing.  If you can’t speak a language, you can’t write a language or read a language – if you go to a foreign country you can communicate through body language, can’t you, through facial expressions, without being able to speak the language.  I think that’s something that some of our children are missing.  They don’t get those social cues; they don’t know when somebody’s feeling like something.  They don’t empathise with other children.  With it being online as well everything’s so instant.  The children haven’t learned to be patient either.  And why would you need to be when you’ve got the internet and you can have anything you want as soon as you want it.  So those interactions and the friendships, you do need to have an element of patients and taking turns, but they don’t do it like that – because why would they need to?  Everything’s on demand.  They can have what they want when they want it.  It’s at their fingertips, if they’ve got a screen in front of them.  Whereas if they’ve got their friends in front of them that’s a bit more challenging.  It’s a bit difficult, isn’t it, because you’ve got to read somebody’s body language and you’ve got to listen to them, you’ve got to cooperate. 

[00:19:28]

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[00:19:42] The point you made there about the importance of those social interactions and just recently I’ve written a chapter that talks about parent’s perceptions of their children’s friendships during COVID and during the lockdown and return to school.   Interestingly one of the parents in that study talked about they felt they could support children with the academic learning, but they said what they found challenging was plugging the gap socially.   This particular parent had two children.  So, there was a sibling relationship, but they were saying it’s not quite the same as your friendships in school so I just kind of wondered what you thought in relation to that, if that’s something that you notice?

Richard Owen:  [00:20:30] You can’t replicate school at home in terms of the social environment.  There are things you can access on screen or parents can have an idea of how to teach children to read.  We encourage parents to do that anyway.  They are helping us to teach their children to read by reading with them at night times, or they might have homework to do over the weekends.  What they can’t do is have 400 children over at their house so they have the social interactions and that is so, so, so important for schools. 

[00:21:05]

[00:21:35] When children are at home, by and large, it depends how many children you’ve got, they are the centre of your attention so what they need they get straight away.  When they’re at school they’re in a class of 30, so their needs cannot necessarily be met straight away.  So again it goes back to those kind of characteristics of being a well-rounded individual and sometimes you have to wait your turn for things.

[00:22:25] We’re finding now that children can’t do that, and the children that do have challenging behaviours are because they can’t have what they want straight away.  Or they can’t do what they want, or what’s on their agenda.  That’s where we have those struggles at the moment.

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[00:22:43] So just coming back to the sort of focus of friendships and you’ve said your school ranges from 3-11 years; I just wanted to ask you what benefits do you feel children get from having friends in school?                             

Richard Owen: [00:23:00] It helps develop them.  They have shared interests; they can learn new interests.  So children learn from one another.   I know I’m a teacher in school but the children learn so much from one another in terms of the things that they do in the classroom, the things that they do out of the classroom.   Lots of children are exposed to other kinds of interests through other children as well, so it could be that they join a football team, or they join a choir group or a dance activity out of school.  Because of them being exposed to that, because other children have experienced that.  So that’s what they get from friendships.  It also helps with their self-esteem.  Feeling included and feeling part of something – a bit like Team Monteney with our staff, that helps children’s self-esteem and their sense of wellbeing. 

[00:23:49] So being isolated in COVID, that had a detrimental affect to that.  That sense of community is something that children thrive on and they need to be in school.  I often say that children come to school to learn to read and write, to do maths. But also just to be around one another and just how to interact with one another.  It’s so important that children have friends.

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[00:24:20] I’m really interested in the sort of pastoral provision that you have in school, and how you support children’s friendships and wellbeing.  Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Richard Owen:  [00:24:30] Since I started here a long, long time ago, we have always had a pastoral team.  So, it’s consisted of a learning mentor, or senior learning mentor, and pupil support assistants.  Currently we have a senior learning mentor and two pupil support assistants.  We also have play workers, and those are the members of staff who support play at breaktimes.  They also support children that might need a more play-based curriculum during learning time as well.  They might also listen to children read as well but our pastoral team are vastly important to our school.  If we didn’t have a pastoral team we would really, really struggle.

It’s about engaging with our community as well.  So it’s engaging with parents, and so making sure that our pastoral team are available for parents to talk to if they’ve got any concerns and any worries.  Having said that though we do have a team that is dedicated to that but the wider ethos of school – we’re all part of the pastoral team in a sense, in that we’re all trained to support children’s learning through emotional regulation.  We all use the zones of emotional regulation to help children articulate their feelings, but also to help find out what they need to do to make themselves feel a bit better, if they do have a big feeling.  So if they’re angry or frustrated or feeling impatient.  

[00:25:53] So we kind of role model that as well for children.  We find a lot of the times we need to teach down regulating activities rather than up regulating activities.

[00:26:04] It’s really interesting that you mention this sort of emotional regulation.  I guess really that’s got to be in place then for children to be able to interact with others and you mentioned – did you say emotional regulation zones?  Could you tell us about what that is.

Richard Owen:  [00:26:15] So that’s an approach used by lots and lots of different schools.  It’s an approach that was first – I think it came from America.  So, the zones of emotional regulation are broken down in to four zones.  There is the blue zone, green zone, yellow zone and there is the red zone.  They are displayed in like a ladder.  So, the blue zone is at the bottom; that’s when you might be feeling tired or slow or feeling a little bit sad about things.  The green zone; that’s when everything’s okay and you’re ready, feeling good, feeling positive.  The yellow zone is when you might be feeling a little bit anxious, a little bit wiggly, a little bit excited, and the red zone is when you feel mad and angry.  You might be shouting and you’re losing control.

[00:27:02] So it helps our children to articulate how they’re feeling, because not only is it in words and the visuals that we’ve got, but there is also visuals from in print as well, so it helps the children to say yes, I feel yellow/red/green.   Linked to that we have things called the toolkit.  So if you are feeling a certain way what are you going to do to regulate your emotions?  We say that there is no wrong zone to be in; so sometimes you do need to feel in the blue zone, for example you need to feel sleepy, but when you’re going to bed.  So you need to be in the blue zone, so that is a good zone to be in at bed time.  The green zone, I think that there’s a focus on ‘Oh, I’ve always got to be in the green zone all the time’.  Nobody is in the green zone all the time.  Nobody feels okay all the time.  Just this morning, I’m sure that we’ve all felt a range of emotions, but because we’re adults we’re able to regulate our emotions and we have developed techniques to help us regulate.  Even when we’re in the yellow zone that’s okay.  Christmas morning you want to feel excited.  It’s fine to be in the yellow zone.  The red zone?  You can feel angry at times.  There are things that you do need to feel passionate and angry about.  It’s what you do when you’re feeling like that, and how to regulate your emotions.

[00:28:21] So there are lots and lots of things you will see in our corridors where you can push against a wall.  That’s for when you’ve got the big red and yellow feelings.  You will see there’s like computer keyboards for children to type their names in on the wall as well.  They can do kind of jumping jacks – that’s when you’re feeling a bit blue.  You might do a bit of exercise.  Just this morning there was one lad in Y4 and his mum had a word with me and said he struggled to get up this morning.  Not feeling great.  So, I’ve taken him for a run around the yard and done a bit of exercise, a bit of activity with him – and you could see he was feeling a lot more positive, a lot more woken up.  So just those kinds of subtle things that we need to kind of change to help children emotionally regulate.

[00:29:07] We all do it.  We all do.   But we need to be a bit more explicit with the children of ‘I am doing this.  I am feeling like this, so I am doing this’ and we do it all the time.  It’s not like a standalone lesson.  We are always using the zones of emotional regulation.  We are always role modelling how to regulate.  We are always being role models with our body language.  So open body language, our facial expressions.  Making sure that our facial expressions are calm, and we talk about, it’s almost not a blank expression, but we don’t judge behaviour.  And it’s the smiling eyes and it’s not with our hands in our pockets or hands behind our back.  You can see our hands.  We’ve got an open body language.  

[00:29:53] Myself, I always make sure that I’m really, really aware of my body language.    I’m quite tall, I’m 6ft 7 and so I work with lots of children that are quite small and not quite 6ft 7. Soi if I am stood next to a child and I’m talking to them they’re looking up at me and it’s uncomfortable for them.  So, I make sure that especially with children that are in a high level of distress, I do not go close to them because that is going to make it a lot worse for them.  I talk calmly from a distance that makes them feel a lot more comfortable.  So it’s just about being aware of yourself in space as well, to help those children emotionally regulate.

[00:30:30] That’s amazing.  It really shows how you tune in to children and listen to them and think about what they need, and the example of somebody coming in and feeling a bit tired and needing to do a little bit of exercise.  I think that is just amazing.  We know of the pressures that schools are under, but actually still to be able to make that time to sort of – you know, you know children are going to struggle if they’ve come into class and they’re going straight in to learning, but to make that time to turn in to children and just give them what they need at that moment.  And I think that it’s really fabulous as well to sort of say it’s okay to be angry.  It’s okay to be feeling blue.  And I think sometimes in society there is that everybody has to be green all of the time and it’s unrealistic isn’t it,   And I think that the way that you respond to children, I’m sure – I could imagine that children could support one another in the way that you role model supporting them.

[00:31:27] So if your friend’s feeling a bit anxious today that you can kind of tune in to them as well and sort of say don’t worry, it’s going to be fine, or let’s do this to help you.  And again that role modelling, which I think probably helps with friendships.

Richard Owen:  [00:31:40] Yeah, and that links into our values as well.  So, we have a list of values at Monteney, and just this last week I did an assembly on empathy.  So, we have talked about when children or friends might be struggling, and trying to think ‘Well it must be difficult for them at this point in time’.  We might not have experienced that ourselves but we can see it’s difficult for them and we can see that they might be feeling in that zone, so how do we respond to them?  And making sure that children treat each other with dignity and respect.  I think that’s really important.  Us role modelling that in schools so that children can see that.

[00:32:19] Gone are the days where you would be shouting at children because if you shout at children they are just going to get angry and they are just going to shout back, or they’re going to get less open to talking about things with you.  

[00:32:32] But going back to the checking in with children; one of the great things about our office team as well is sometimes children are late, and for me I hate being late for anything.  I would rather be an hour early than two minutes late.  If I’m walking into something and it’s already started and I have to walk in and go ‘Excuse me, sorry’ and trying to find my seat, I feel so self-conscious and then I’m going into the yellow zone because I’m feeling anxious and I’m not comfortable.  

[00:32:59] I’ve not had time to select my seat, because I like to sit with nobody behind me.  I like to be able to see everything.  So, it’s about me knowing myself and so that’s why I like to be early. Some children don’t have that option because they don’t choose or their parents bring them to school.  So, if they’re late and they have to walk into class late the last thing they want when they come through the main doors is the office team going ‘Why are you late?’  ‘Not late again’, so our office team are so positive.  They are so welcoming, they are so friendly with children, and they don’t accuse children of being late.  It’s brilliant to see you.  It’s great to see you this morning.  There is a number of children that sometimes are late with additional needs because they might have struggled to get ready in the morning, and they love our office team.  They give them a hug.  The children actually say that they love the office team and that start for them in the morning is absolutely key, and I think that check in and just those tweaks to things really, really can change a child’s day.  

[00:34:06] One of the things in the training that we do is a dot on the page.  I don’t know if you’ve heard of it?  You have a big A3 piece of paper, you put a dot right in the middle, and then you ask the people what can you see?  And they say ‘The dot’ but obviously there’s the dot that takes up a tiny, tiny bit of the page but you can see a big page as well, so it’s not just looking at what you can see in front of you straight away. A child that’s come in late, you don’t know what kind of morning they’ve had.  Are they in the red zone?  Are they in the yellow zone?  Are they in the blue zone?  So, if you are welcoming and friendly with them straight away that helps them to think ‘Oh no, it’s okay, I’m somewhere safe’ so that can help support them. 

[00:34:49] It might not.  I’ve had a terrible morning, but I know with my own kids, if we’re running late then I’m not at my best, I’m not saying ‘Oh don’t worry, it’s okay, let’s just plod on’.  I’m like ‘Come on!  Let’s go!’ so I’m hurrying them along and that’s going to cause them stress, it’s going to cause me stress and so I would imagine – because we’re all human, that parents have had something very similar in the morning and the last thing that children want is to be accused or being late.

[00:35:21] So that’s key.  A start in the morning that’s positive from our office team is really important to how we set the tone for children’s days.

[00:35:26] And then it’s kind of that feeling of wellbeing when you come in, isn’t it.  I was just thinking about that idea of attendance, and the link with – you know if you’ve had a bad morning there might be a tendency to think I’m not going to go because I’m going to get told off when I get there, I will just not go today, whereas actually if you know actually I am late but I’m going to get a nice welcome – better late than never.

[00:36:21] We’ve talked a little bit about COVID and obviously I’m thinking about this cost of living crisis and do you feel now in these new times that there are particular challenges or adaptions that you need to make in terms of supporting children with friendships and wellbeing.

Richard Owen:  [00:36:41] Yeah, massively.  Massively.  So, our pastoral team, we’ve had to deploy those differently.  Five, six, seven years ago our pastoral team would be supporting groups of children that might have friendship issues, disagreements, that kind of thing.  And we could run a series of interventions for those children over a number of weeks, but as the children that we have in school have far more complex needs, and there aren’t the services externally to support them, our pastoral team are having to be deployed to support those children. 

[00:37:22] So the pastoral element of things falls on to class teachers.  So a class teacher is having to be almost that pastoral, running interventions kind of thing, but also teaching the curriculum.  I think that there are two agendas at the moment.  There is the kind of curriculum and this kind of ‘We need to be moving this way, we need to be rapid with what we’re doing’ and then there’s the wellbeing agenda and teachers are in the middle of that at the moment.   So, they’ve got people like me saying you need to be doing this, or you need to be doing this as well, and you need to do that as well, and by they way there’s another thing here that we need to be doing’ and it’s just too much.  So, we need to make sure that we are focusing on relationships, friendships, and interactions.

[00:38:17] If you try and spread yourself too thin you’re not going to do anything well.  It’s going to have a detrimental impact for children. You talk about children’s outcomes and the outcomes that they should be getting is that they know how to function in society as they leave primary school.  Yes, it’s challenging times at the moment.

[00:38:34] Yes, that’s really interesting.  And interesting that you’re saying about making the adaption, that you’re responding to the situation.   So, it kind of draws us to my final question really, and it’s been really interesting talking to you, and I just wondered at this point if you’ve got any, it might be a take home message, or a reflection, or a question, or a thought that you want the listener to take away from this podcast?

Richard Owen:  [00:39:06] I think that we need to let children be children and make mistakes and have fun and explore and make sure that our curriculum is irresistible for them.  Our children at Monteney, that is one of our key drivers: oracy.  Making sure that our children are talking because if they’re good talkers then they can write. 

[00:40:23] You can’t write anything down if you can’t talk about it.  So at the moment I think that the curriculum, it needs to change.  It needs to be fit for purpose.  Children change.  Generations change.  You think about the children in the 50s compared to the children in the 60s.  Very different.  Compared to the children in the 70s and what they experienced.  Very different.  Then in to the 80s, and 90s.  Every generation, children change.  I feel at the moment we’re looking back at something and trying to catch up on something when we should be looking forward.  And that’s what we need to be doing.  Looking at careers that might be happening in the next 20, 30, 40 years.  You look at the things with climate change, and is that something on the agenda, do we need to be looking at that and are there other industries that we need to be thinking about and making sure that children can be educated towards working in that?  I think that yeah, looking forward and adapting to the children now and their needs now, and what they’re interested in now with the kind of generation where everything’s on demand and you can get everything instantly.  We need to make that our curriculum.  More tailored towards the children in that it’s irresistible for them not to be in school and they want to be in school and they want to learn.

[00:41:50] There was something I heard, I was on a podcast a few weeks ago about somebody saying that schools teach children to remember when they should teach them to think.  And I think that’s what we need to do.  The example I gave the other day, I think as we were walking around, there was a lad that struggles with his learning.  He had made some fans.  He made a fan out of paper because it’s hot outside at the moment, and he tried – he said ‘Mr Owen, you can buy this for £1’ and I was like ‘Well I haven’t got any money, I’m sorry, I don’t have any money’.  ‘Okay, a house point’.  Alright, okay, you can have a house point for that.  And that’s him, he’s seen that there’s a need. He’s kind of interested in creative things, and that’s his learning.  So, he’s learnt about kind of talking to people and compromising with people, which he has compromised there, but then the next day he made a fan out of card, because it was a bit more sturdy, and it was a better one, so he upped the price, two house points.  And we went with that learning.  And that’s the kind of thing that we need to do.

[00:42:55] Now if I said to him ‘Now write about that’, not a chance.  There would be no point to write about that. So yeah, we need to make sure that our curriculum suits the children, but also remember our families too. We need to make sure that families are part of the children’s learning journey, which COVID sadly has stopped that happening as much.

[00:43:19] if I could change anything I would try and involve parents more and more in the school day. I think that would be something to develop further.  I think that one of the things at the moment that parents are struggling with is that after lockdown lots of schools have stopped parents coming into school in the mornings, and I can see the reasons why and there has been some reductions in things like separation anxiety but it’s the reduction of separation anxiety in the classroom just moved to outside now.  So, I think involving parents more in the children’s education so that they feel part of it.

[00:44:02] We’ve talked about teams.  So, the children feeling part of a team, the staff feeling part of a team.  I think that parents need to feel part of that team as well.

[00:44:10] That’s so interesting, because that chapter that I was referring to was about parent’s perceptions of their children’s friendships.  It came from a study originally where I was just going to interview some staff and also work with some children about their perceptions and as I was doing the interviews parents, members of staff were saying that parents find it hard with this, that or the other’ and I thought actually the voice of parents is missing here. 

[00:44:38] So I intentionally did these interviews with parents because I thought how difficult it is for a parent if a child comes home and says I’ve had this challenge with a friend today and your child will tell you, but sometimes you get like part of the story or you get like their perception on something and then you’re trying to support them at home not knowing the full context.  

[00:45:01] And then you’ve got the teacher that’s got 30 children and trying to support your child from a distance with things can be quite tricky, can’t it.

Richard Owen:  [00:45:12] Absolutely.

[00:45:14] So I just think that it’s really interesting that you are saying about involving parents, and I can really see the benefits of that, particularly to children’s friendships.

Richard Owen:  [00:45:23] I think that, because there are some parents that have not seen their children’s classroom.  So, they don’t know the learning environment, they don’t know what happens, and quite naturally when you don’t know what’s happening you make up your own narrative about things and I think sometimes that’s what happens.   We’re all guilty of that.  It’s natural to do those kinds of things.  And me myself, having children myself, what you’re doing is you’re sending your most precious thing in the world to somewhere where you don’t know or somewhere where you’ve not seen.  Schools are lovely places to be.  The staff in school want to be in school because they love working with children.  I always think that.  You wouldn’t work in a school if you didn’t love working with children.  Parents need to remember that but still, if you’re sending your most precious thing in the world to somewhere you don’t know and you don’t know what’s happening and they’re having some disagreements or difficulties, then it’s hard for you to kind of help them.  It’s hard for parents to regulate their emotions, it’s hard for them not to feel stressed about things.  It’s hard for them not to pass that stress on to the children about it.  So, I think that we just need to make sure that we are embracing our community and working with our community.  Working with parents.  And having our parents, as much as we possibly can, in school.

[00:46:41] And we’re starting to do that now with parents coming in for reading mornings and things like that.  I don’t think it can get back to how it was because the world has changed and we need to change with the world, but we need to think of more creative ways to involve our parents so that they know what’s happening with their children in school.

[00:46:55] It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you. 

Richard Owen:  [00:46:57] I’ve enjoyed it.

[00:47:00] I think that you are an inspirational role model, I really do. When you were talking about feelings and regulating and all of those things, I just thought what a role model you are, so it’s fantastic.  Thank you very much.

Richard Owen: [00:47:12] Thank you very much.  Thanks.

[00:47:15] [music playing] Thank you for listening to this podcast.  For more information on Caron’s research and other related podcasts, please visit  https://research.shu.ac.uk/friends   This podcast was made possible by a fellowship opportunity funded by Sheffield Hallam University.  [music playing]

Froebelian Principles and Children’s Friendships (2 of 2)

[00:00:00] [music playing] Hello, and welcome to Children’s Friendships Matter.  A podcast about children’s friendships post-COVID 19.    In this, the second of two episodes, Dr Caron Carter continues her discussion with Professor Sacha Powell, Professor Tina Bruce, and Doctor Stella Louis from the Froebel Trust, reflecting on Froebelian courses and the impact of COVID 19 on children’s friendships.   

[00:00:39] I’m really interested in Froebel and Froebel’s training courses and sessions that they have and I just wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about that, and maybe any links to friendships.  I think Stella, perhaps you’re the person to go to first on this one.

Stella Louis: [00:01:03] What I would say first is Froebel talks about the child, their relationship with themselves, their relationship with others, contributing to a family, a community, and the wider physical environment and I think all of those things you can link to friendship.  When you think about how you get to find out about yourself, it’s through your family.  So although I might not explicitly mention the word friendship, I think that going back to Froebel’s core ideas about self, others, and relationships and it’s those relationships that become absolutely critical.  

[00:01:44] In relation to the short courses, the short courses were developed by Professor Tina Bruce, and I have nurtured them for a long time now.  I’ve nurtured them for the last five years and I like the word ‘nurtured’ because Froebel nature was really, really important to Froebel.  There are six elements, each element is made up of two days, delivered by two indoors Froebelian travelling tutors and the course has been delivered in Australia, in South Africa, in New Zealand, in Wales and in Scotland and in England, so hence us being called travelling tutors.

[00:02:29] The first element really looks at Froebelian principles, and really encouraging practitioners to locate themselves in practice.  The second element is looking at Froebel’s gifts and occupations, and there are links to modern day relevant block play today, which Tina spoke about, and Sacha, earlier on.

[00:02:49] Element two is really getting practitioners to think about worthwhile, you know, thinking about and reflecting on the worthwhile educational resources that they offer children.  Element three is about engaging in and with nature, and it really begins to unpick Froebel’s ideas of unity, connectedness, law of opposites, and that relationship.  You know, the relationship that we have with nature, for instance.

[00:03:17] Element four looks at the symbolic life of the child and how children make their inner outer, and whether they do it through movement, mark making, through their play – but again that dictates having knowledgeable educator so that they can understand exactly what it is that they’re seeing.  So that is element four. 

[00:03:41] Element five is Froebel’s mother songs, and Sacha talked a little bit about that earlier on.

[00:03:46] And element six is about looking at Froebelian ideas of equity, equality, diversity and inclusion.  Looking at those issues through a Froebelian lens, and I would say that the Froebelian understanding of equity is that we begin where learners are, and we start with where they are rather than where we want them to be and whatever that stage we need to be that stage.  But again, that comes with knowledge.

[00:04:18] But I just quickly want to go back to element four.  It’s talking about the symbolic life of the child, and I think that this is a really important element.  When Tina and I were in South Africa this last May we were gifted some blocks by a colleague and when we introduced the blocks to a group of children that we hadn’t met before and we weren’t aware of what block play experience they had had, one little girl, there was just something about her that we just took notice of and she started to build a structure kind of sort of upright, and then she was talking to the teacher and it transpired that that night she had been bitten by a rat and what she was doing was she was building a rat house. 

[00:05:03] And even though it was like an upright structure on day 1, by day 4 it was like some kind of really solid enclosure that she had built and I think relationships are really important and I think that for me, that particular observation, not just linked to the relationships she had with the educator that she could talk about it, but what it says is that solitary play is really important and solitary play must be valued because it offers children the opportunities for repetition, reflection, consideration and it also allows them personal space that they need. 

[00:05:44] If we look at self, relationship with others, and community – you can see how you can really bring this whole concept of friendships together, because a Froebelian mantra is link always.  Always.  Always link.

[00:06:00] It’s really great to hear that passion you have for your Frobel courses, because there’s quite a lot of interesting things there and I’m not going to say too much because I want to get everybody’s ideas in but maybe when we talk about COVID, when you were talking about links to nature, we will maybe come back to that point and how children connect with nature.

[00:06:21] Tina, would you like to add anything to the Froebel courses?

Tina Bruce: [00:06:29] I mean I think one of the things that’s so useful is that they are very practical. So, you’re asking the practitioners to try things out themselves, because Sacha talked about rehearsal for friendship, well you need rehearsal for making those relationships with the children and things like block play we’re finding on the courses are invaluable for that sort of thing.   I mean I mentioned block play earlier, but when I was a child, I also mentioned I played a lot with the doll’s house and like Sacha, it was moving house that really helped me to have the solitary play that was very rich.

[00:07:09] There was a little boy who lived down the road to where we moved, and he had a train set.  Wow.  Now I had all that experience of my solitary play with the dolls house, and he had a lot of experience of solitary play with the trainset because he had actually broken his leg and couldn’t move around a tremendous bit for a while and so I went to his house.  I took my dolls house things, and we made towns and villages and all sorts of things on this route of the trainset and it was absolutely fabulous and we became very good friends.

[00:07:45] So sometimes I think solitary play is a rehearsal for – and then you’ve got things to talk about because friendship is actually about shared interests and finding things that chime with each other, it doesn’t just happen, and we’re not going to be friends with everybody and so for children they need to begin to try out, you know, who are the kind of people that it’s going to be lovely to have the deeper kinds of friendships.  Because we have companions and people that we get to know and we go through life there, but actually when you talk about friendship it’s something that’s quite deep.

[00:08:19] So I think the courses actually are very helpful to the practitioners and they do things like dance together and they make up songs together and they tell stories together and so they are beginning to think how do we create this nurturing environment where we can actually use our knowledge as practitioners to help those children learn.

[00:08:40] I’m just thinking that one of the stories actually that I absolutely love is about a little girl, a refugee context, small boats, she as part of this experience of arising on a beach finds a pebble, and that pebble becomes her friend, and another little boy becomes her friend through the pebble.  They draw a face on the pebble with a pen that they find on the beach and when her family leaves obviously to go to a better place the little boy is left behind and she gives him her pebble.  And that is a very deep friendship, and it deals with loss as well as becoming friends.

[00:09:23] So I think that this kind of training that Stella is leading is very, very important in helping people actually to try things out in a very practical way.

[00:09:31] Thank you for that amazing story and again that idea of objects and how they can initiate or develop friendship is so important.  Sacha, would you like to add anything to that?

Sacha Powell: [00:09:45] The courses, as Stella has already said, the courses start where the learner is and of course in those courses the learners are educators who are working with children and families.  So, if the pre-occupation of a learner or a group of learners was aspects of children’s friendship then that is what the course would be about, regardless of whether it’s element oner or element six.  You might think about equity in relation to children’s friendships.  It is very practical and practically oriented and the kinds of activities, whether it be writing songs or something else that take place during the courses build on what interests preoccupy those learners on the courses.   So, I think that was just one thing that I wanted to say around friendships.

[00:10:36] Thank you, that’s great. There is so much I would love to pick up on but I know that we really need to move on.

[music playing]

[00:10:47] This is the penultimate question.  I wanted to ask about the COVID 19 pandemic of course, because it’s such an unprecedented situation that we’ve had with children being socially isolated and I’ve recently done some research with children and parents looking at kind of exploring how children had maintained or tried to maintain their friendships during lockdowns and returns to school and I just wondered what your views were on the COVID 19 pandemic and the impact on children’s friendships, so can I start with you Tina?

Tina Bruce: [00:11:22]  Yes, I mean it’s been such a major part of our lives for several years hasn’t it, the pandemic.  One of the things that stuck me was seeing two little sisters who were playing out their ideas and it linked so strongly with the research which the Froebel Trust has funded with Chris Pascal helping Sally Cave, who leads school, she is head of school at Guildford and the family centre and how the children actually want to be very informed about COVID and didn’t want things to be kept from them about people dying and they were creating private play spaces in the garden, because they couldn’t be in the classrooms very much, and playing out death scenes.  All sorts of very interesting things.  

[00:12:16] And these two little sisters had been involved in Froebelian paper folding so they had made lots of paper cones.  One of the children was lying down and had put the cones all over her stomach and said ‘I’m a corona virus’.  Those are the ones that I’ve been thinking about.

[00:12:36] Yeah, that’s so interesting.  And Sacha, can I go to you next?

Sacha Powell: [00:12:41] Yes, thanks Caron and thanks Tina for reminding us of the fantastic research that Chris and her colleagues did in England and Scotland.  I think it was not the first, some the first research ever to take place about young children’s experiences of the pandemic in 2020 and what I think was really striking about it was the way that children express their anxieties.  Whether that was about loss of friendship, loss of family, loss of freedom and a whole host of other things, or anxiety about the virus, but in so doing also showed huge knowledge and wisdom about what was going on around them in their worlds and that they had a thirst for knowledge.  They didn’t want to be closeted away.  They didn’t want to not know what the realities of COVID were and I think that as really a fascinating aspect of the project and undoubtedly through other research that we’ve funded, for example an Access to Nature project which was about equity, we know that there are huge inequities that occurred as a consequence of COVID and the aftermath for the young children and their families.

[00:13:55] But I think that what Chris Pascal and her colleagues’ research really showed was that yes, there are some terrible things that happened but what they were able to focus on too was some of the amazing things that young children were knowing, and doing, and expressing about COVID and during COVID lockdowns, which showed their incredible resilience and ability to adapt and be flexible in circumstances that are incredibly difficult.

[00:14:25] Thank you Sacha, and that reminds me of what I was talking about earlier, that you’ve reminded me of but also Stella reminded me of in terms of children connecting with nature.  So, the research that I did, it was quite fascinating really because the children started to talk about how they had made connections with nature, because they’d been going out on walks more, they’d been spending more time in their gardens.  And one of the children actually drew a lovely picture and drew, they said some of the friends that had visited them in their garden.  They said there was a hedgehog and a fox, and they had kind of got all these sort of animals but they were referring to them as friends.  And I thought it was so interesting because they had also previously spoken to me about ‘Actually I used to play in the garden with my friends’, you know, peer friends that came to play, and now they were talking about this connection with nature and I just thought that was really, really interesting.

[00:15:23] Let me move to you Stella before we come to our final question, in case you want to add anything on COVID.

Stella Louis:  [00:15:30] I think what I would add actually builds on what both Tina and Sacha have just said.   During COVID I was doing a training session online because everything moved to online and I was working with a nursery school and they were talking about they were closed down for a while but when they opened they had decided this is what we were going to be doing with the children, we were going to have maths stations, we were going to get the children to learn about shops and counting but actually the children wanted to develop their knowledge in very, very different ways.  Like Froebel believed, they kind of said no, we don’t want a shop.  And within their friendship groups and their relationships with others they were like no, we don’t want a shop.  What we want to do is we want to make masks and we want to be able to draw arrows on the floor to say it’s two metres between this person and this person in the queue.

[00:16:27] Firsthand experience, we mustn’t underestimate it in relation to children’s wider relationships with the world.  And I think that kind of sort of just brings together what both Tina and Sacha were talking about, that it is that engagement that will help children develop an understanding of not just themselves but their relationship with others and also what they need and want.

[00:16:54] Again, it shows that real attunement with children and what do they need at this moment in time, instead of trying to go ahead with the sort of maths and the shop agenda, but we’re thinking no, this isn’t what’s needed at the moment, this is what’s needed at the moment.

[music playing]

[00:17:14] So I will just go to the final question now:  What sort of take-home messages, or it might be reflections or it might be a question would you like the listeners to take away from this podcast?  So, could I start with you Tina?

Tina Bruce: [00:17:29] Well, that’s an enormous question isn’t it.  I think that there are three things that really beam out for me.  One is the way that relationships matter so much.  Knowing yourself, being aware of yourself, your sense of identity and that helps you to link with others.  As Stella said, always link, Froebel.  And to move to the wider community of people that you don’t know and haven’t met, but you begin to think about them.

[00:18:00] So relationships matter.  Play is a wonderful way for children to be getting to grips with these things.  Solitary play we’ve talked about a lot, but also the play with other children, and play with adults.  So, play matters, and throughout we keep coming back to adults needing to be very knowledgeable about how children develop and learn, and being very good at creating a nurturing environment so that children can grow and develop their thinking, having ideas, and relationships that really work well for them.

[00:18:45] That’s great, thank you.  And then Sacha?

Sacha Powell: [00:18:48] Well mine is very short really.  I agree with everything that Tina has said.  Friendships start from birth.

[00:18:56] Yes, thank you.  And Stella?

Stella Louis: [00:19:00] I think I would draw on Tina’s twelve features of play and say something that is really important that we take away when we’re thinking about these relationships is that play; we need to see play as an integrated mechanism that brings together children’s ideas, their feelings and their relationships.  It is in play that children co-ordinate their ideas, their faults, and feelings well as their physical body.   But they are also able to make sense of their social relationships and their sense of themselves and the world around them.

[00:19:39] Thank you.  It has been a real privilege to talk to you today around children’s friendships and also to hear a lot more about Froebel and Froebelian principles and how they link so closely to children’s friendships.  It’s fantastic to hear about the ongoing work that you do and the passion that you have for Early Years and for children and young families.  So, I think that’s brilliant.  Thank you very much.

[00:20:12] [music playing] Thank you for listening to this podcast. For more information on Caron’s research and other related podcasts, please visit  https://research.shu.ac.uk/friends   This podcast was made possible by a fellowship opportunity funded by Sheffield Hallam University.  [music playing]

Froebelian Principles and Children’s Friendships (1 of 2)

[00:00:00] [music playing] Hello, and welcome to Children’s Friendships Matter.  A podcast about children’s friendships post-COVID 19.    In this, the first of two episodes, Dr Caron Carter talks to Professor Sacha Powell, Professor Tina Bruce, and Doctor Stella Louis from the Froebel Trust, reflecting on research and practice.    Here they explore Froebelian principles and their links to children’s friendships, considering how a Froebelian ethos can support children’s friendships.   This first episode explores research projects and publications, and the following second episode: Froebelian courses and the impact of COVID 19 on children’s friendships.

[00:00:57] Welcome to the podcast. It’s fantastic to be able to speak today to three people on this podcast.  So, I just wondered if we could start with you introducing yourselves and telling us a little bit about your background?  Could we start with you Sacha?

Sacha Powell: [00:01:14] Sure, thanks Caron.  It’s great to be here today.  My name’s Sacha Powell and I’m the Chief Executive Officer of the Froebel Trust, which is a charity which supports and encourages early childhood educators and researchers and teachers who work with young children, and we do that by providing grants for research and practice development but also a range of free resources and events, and some specialised continuing professional development courses. 

[00:01:46] And then Tina.

Tina Bruce: [00:01:49] Hello, I’m Tina Bruce and I’m an honorary professor at University of Roehampton.  I originally trained at the Froebel Educational Institute to be a primary school teacher and I found that I loved the earliest years the best and so I specialised in that increasingly across the years.  And I also trained to work with children with profound hearing loss at University of Manchester, and I’ve been involved in teacher training and bits of research and all sorts of things across the years, but my passion is the children and families that they come from.

[00:02:27] Thank you very much.  And Stella.

Stella Louis: [00:02:35] Hello, I’m Dr Stella Louis and I’m a freelance Early Years consultant.  Currently I work as the lead Froebelian travelling tutor for the Froebel Trust and that involves leading a group of 22 travelling tutors and we deliver Froebel short courses online and universally.   My interest in Early Years goes back when I originally trained as an NNEB Nursery Nurse a long time ago now, and I became really interested in children and observation.  Yeah, observation and just trusting my instinct and looking for their good intentions.  Although I couldn’t articulate that at the time, I think the Froebelian framework has really helped me to do that.   So,I’m involved in research universally as well with Froebel short courses, so that’s me.

[00:03:41] Thank you very much.  it’s really, really great to hear about how you’ve come to Early Years and a little bit about your background, so thank you.

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[00:03:55] Kind of moving on from that a little bit, but you’ve already mentioned, Stella you just mentioned research, and I think Tina did as well.  Could you tell us about your research so the listeners can hear a little bit more about that?  So can we start again with Stella?

Stella Louis: [00:04:11] Okay, I’ve been involved in a piece of research in Soweto, South Africa.   My involvement started in 2010 where I was invited along to join Professor Tina Bruce and Professor Ian Bruce in pre-school, in a kindergarten, in a place called Kliptown, Soweto.  Ian had been working with the youth project next door and Tina and been accompanying him and next door to the youth project was a pre-school and the principal of the pre-school really wanted her pre-school to be just like the European pre-schools and she kept saying to Tina that she would love to work with her, but Tina didn’t want to work with her as a white woman on her own.  

[00:05:02] So I was invited, because it was felt that what would be really important, that whatever work or research that was going to happen in South Africa, there would be that level of connectedness, unity.   I got involved in 2010 and it was the first time I went out to South Africa, but Tina and Ian had been involved previously and my role was as the main trainer, to train the staff that were in this pre-school. 

[00:05:32] It’s been a really long project, and there has been lots of things that have happened along the way.  Initially we embarked on staff training, training the staff in different parts of the Froebelian approach.  We started with the principles; we looked at freedom with guidance, we looked at the community, and we used a particular framework called Asset Based Community Development, which we referred to as ‘ABCD’.  And what that does is it builds on a community’s strengths rather than identifying any weaknesses or deficits and that was really challenging in Soweto but what was wonderful was that we were able to use the Froebelian principles and the Froebelian approach to really support the practice.  Because even though it was a pre-school I think just historically where this township is located children would just roam the streets.  And although Pam, the Principal opened up this pre-school, it was more to care for the children rather than to educate the children. 

[00:06:46] So that was really our starting point and starting with where the community had strengths.   Long story short:  if we kind of fast-forward to 2023, Tina, Ian and I recently attended a graduation session of one of the participants in this research, which was graduating as a teacher.  So, the dream behind the project has been to train the staff up so that they are not just offering the children care but they are offering the children education.  But equally, the community have realised the importance of Early Years.

[00:07:28] When we first went in there, there were 50 children in a room with one member of staff and that is challenging.  Now you go in there, and we were there recently I think in May, and there was one room in particular that you go in and you could be anywhere in Europe and you wouldn’t know, anywhere around the world, not just Europe.  I’m not going to just limit it to that.  Children were autonomous, you could see the Froebelian principles really in action.  Staff were knowledgeable, they were observing children, and children were constantly engaged in doing or reflecting or contemplating them.  Children were playing on their own and there were children in friendship groups.  There was so much going on for the children and it was such richness, but that has been a really long process and it’s easy to look in in 2023 and say this is wonderful, but we have actually come a really long way.

[00:08:22] So it’s been about staff training, working with the community, and building on their strengths rather than focusing on weaknesses.

[00:08:31] Really interesting to think as well, you know, that starting from the community strengths and that idea where you can actually think about, you know, what can we learn from one another, from the different communities.  So it’s really interesting to hear about that and to hear how those Froebelian principles have kind of become embedded over time.  Really interesting.  Thank you.  And Tina, can we move on to you and hear a little bit about your research?

Tina Bruce:  [00:09:01] I think it segues in to what Stella was talking about because I thought of this one lovely little example, which Stella and I observed, where children had been involved with block play and they had made a wonderful – they said it was the Carlton Tower, and we realised, talking with the staff, that this had been one of the most important days when President Mandela became president and there had been huge celebrations at the Carlton Tower and I think that some of the children knew about this and they started to dance around this fabulous construction and so this was the kind of thing, you know, these little friendships that are occurring with the children and how they begin to work collaboratively together.  They feel comfortable to develop their ideas together and they begin to listen to each other in what they’re doing and then you get a wonderful group community enterprise.

[00:10:12] So these were some of the ways that we could see the things that Stella was talking about; the autonomy, the nurturing, and the joy in being together.  All of these things which are deeply part of the Froebelian approach.   And the block play has always been something dear to my heart, because some years ago now I was given some grant funding by the Froebel governing body to undertake some research with block play because blocks were Froebel’s gifts, and we did this using unit blocks in five different schools; they were primary schools.  And we worked with the youngest children and again if I give you an example of the kind of thing that we began to see across the two years was two little girls, Pat Gura was the research director and she would share her findings with us all and we wrote a book about it, which was published by Sage, and we noticed that these two little girls had made a wonderful – it was a cantilever bridge, which is pretty good engineering, and Pat said to these two little girls how did you manage to get these blocks in place?  And one of them said ‘Well, you need a friend, because one of them has to hold the block while the other one positions the block and it’s quite a delicate exercise’, and so that was an example of the kind of things that were emerging from the research.  And we called our book ‘Exploring Block Play’. 

[00:11:55] It’s still in print, Caron.  It’s one of the most used books on block play, which is very heartening.

[00:12:02] It’s so interesting to talk about play and friendship because play is so integral to friendship and making sure that friendship and play and those opportunities for play are still there and for children to have free play, and you talked about that agency and that autonomy.  So important for nurturing and maintaining friendships.  So thank you.  And Sacha?

Sacha Powell: [00:12:30] Thanks Caron.  I was thinking about what both Stella and Tina have said and thinking about block play.  And this is not my own research, but it’s research that the Froebel Trust has funded in Wales at Cardiff Metropolitan University, which has just been reported and will be published very soon.   It’s by Jennifer Clement and Sian Sarwar, and in their research, they had invited classes of teachers and young children to come to what they call Froebel House in the campus of Cardiff Met University.  And at the house they have a range of resources including all of Froebel’s gifts and occupations and one of the things that they particularly noted in their report where they had spent many months observing young children’s free-flow play was that where the children were playing with Froebel’s gifts and engaged in block play, in an ethos where the children were supported to be autonomous and grow in that autonomy that new friendships began to develop because of the open-endedness of those block play resources and because of the autonomy that the children were allowed to developed by the teachers stepping back and observing what was happening and engaging with and alongside those children as and when the children indicated that they might need some support to extend their thinking and their learning.

[00:14:05] So I think that that was a really lovely example of the continuing relevance, or the timelessness if you like, of block play in 2023 in Wales, where these new researchers are finding the benefits in today’s society for young children.

[00:14:30] That’s great.  I think across all three of you, the things that you’ve said, you know, talking about play and Stella talked about going with your instincts and I think that we know that children need those opportunities for free flow play and they need those opportunities in order to sort of instigate friendships, maintain and nurture their friendships.  So, so interesting.  Thank you very much.

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[00:15:00] I also walked to talk to you a little bit about things that you’ve written.  So it might be books, articles, or things that you’ve written.  Obviously, the audience will be so interested.  Listeners will be so interested to know about the things that you’ve written and any links that there might be to children’s friendships.  So could we start with Stella?

Stella Louis: [00:15:24] I’ve recently written an introduction to Froebel for beginners actually, for Tapestry, which is an online learning journal, but you can access this Froebel for Beginners free, and it looks at the Froebelian principles, as articulated by the Froebel Trust, and very kind of relevant for today.

[00:15:45] And what it does is it brings together Tina Bruce’s principles, Helen Tovey’s principles, and it just connects them together.  So that is something that I’ve written recently but something else I’ve written recently is this book here: Observing Learning in Early Childhood, and it is relevant to friendships because it’s based on Tina’s work.  In 1996 Tina wrote about The Network for Learning and as an NNEB student that did things for me, in ways that I cannot describe.  It really does describe learning and it guides educators in knowing what to observe and how to intervene and when a child may need help.  Because, you know, sometimes – depending on their experiences, there will be children that need help to play but educators need to know what those cues are.  They need to know what that looks like, so observing learning in young children really just bigs up, I think, Tina’s Network for Learning and it uses it as an observational and navigating tool to really get to know your children and what it is they’re expressing externally.  Yeah.

[00:17:09] Thank you, that’s so interesting.  What we will do with the podcast is we will make sure that these links to the things that we’re talking about are available next to the podcast, so you know where to go and find them.  So, you’ve mentioned the book and a Tapestry and we’ll make sure that those links are on there.

[00:17:21] As well Stella, when you were talking about – you know, we’ve talked a lot about children having agency and autonomy and that is definitely the case with children’s friendships, but also, you’ve talked about when children might need scaffolding or they might need support or they might want that help and support.  And interestingly I wrote an article about the lunchtime period and children’s play and friendships and that came up where children said sometimes, I do want someone to help me.  So, I think that’s really important, isn’t it, that we think about children’s agency on autonomy, but also we’re tuned in to children for those opportunities and those times when they do want adults or more able peers or others around them to support and help them.  So that is really interesting, thank you.  And could we move now to Tina?

Tina Bruce: [00:18:15] That Network Learning which Stella talked about from one of my publications, I started off thinking around that in 1991, and I wrote a book called Time to Play in Early Childhood Education.  It’s a long time ago, but I sort of extracted from the canon of literature on play 12, they seemed like recurring themes really and they became 12 features of play.   Some of them were to do with children being involved in solitary play, you know, having imaginary friends, which children will sometimes do when they’re alone, but it was also not about children being lonely and not wanting to be engaged in solitary play.   And I was thinking back to my own childhood and how we moved house, and I loved my doll’s house and I loved my doll’s house and I had all these characters and people I can still remember; a little girl called Flora who lived in that doll’s house and went to school and all sorts of things.  And so those 12 features of play are sort of trying to look at the different things that children need and, as you say Caron, the kind of help that they might need at a certain point.

[00:19:30] But as Stella said, knowing when to help them and when to hold back.  It all helps you to make sense of people like Vygotsky and Winnicott and Erikson.  All these giants in the field of play.   So it’s quite practitioner friendly, because when you’re with the children you just have to do what your heart-  As Stella said; what your instinct is saying to you.  So, it’s trying to sort of strengthen practitioners to have confidence, to feel that they can really have some agency and autonomy and the right kind of control so that they don’t invade children’s play.

[00:20:09] So I wrote Time to Play, I wrote Cultivating Creativity in Early Childhood, and then I became involved in a research project which the Froebel Trust funded about children’s storytelling, because also the kinds of stories that we read to children, they begin to come out in the play and that very often turns in to quite a collaborative kind of play. Because as well as the story you need some other characters and so if they’ve not got a doll’s house or smaller – you might want some other children to participate in that play.

[00:20:42] And actually that won an award that book.  It was different chapters by different practitioners all thinking about storytelling and how stories can help children to learn through their play.  I have recently written a book about Friedrich Froebel because I just felt I was on a journey and it was where I had sort of landed up in 2021, and it’s called Critical Debates and Aims, or something like that, An Introduction to Froebel.   That is not so practical, but I have got practical examples in that but it’s kind of taking stock of the Froebelian framework, which as Stella said, is something that we all try to work with.

[00:21:22] Yeah, it’s really interesting that you pick up on imaginary friends.  I remember having an imaginary friend that got up to all sorts of things, including taking a bite out of the cheese in the fridge and all sorts of things.  My imaginary friend got blamed for lots of things.  You know, I’ve written something around imaginary friends that come in the form of objects, and so that might be a cuddly toy or some other object like a Lego figure.  Also, I think those stories that you get from practitioners, from children that you hear about are so vivid really and so important, and it shows this other meaning of what these object friends have.

[00:22:09] Some years ago there was some concern about imaginary friends, and that was this okay for children to have imaginary friends, was that going to be at the expense of peer friends, or sometimes concerns of children being on their own.  I think now what’s really good is that we look at imaginary friends and we see actually no, this is a creative process, it’s kind of enhancing, it’s kind of opportunities for rehearsing things with your peers and so on.  So, I think that it’s great that we can see that there’s a real value in those imaginary friends that might be there.

[00:22:48] I had a really nice story that was shared with me of a child that had a little Lego figure that was their friends and I think they used it to sort of initiate friendships with other children, you know, kind of used the object and would say ‘Do you want to play with me and my little Lego friend?’ and what have you.

[00:23:09] And also, it kind of brought home to me the value of that object as a friend, because they talked about keeping it with them.  I think they were in Y1 and so I think that there was some concern that I think the adults were less keen on them bringing objects to school in case they got broken or damaged but he really wanted this little figure with him and he talked about going to PE and putting shorts and a T-shirt on and then not having any place to put the little Lego friend, but he really needed the Lego friend to come to PE, so he put the Lego friend in his pump and did PE with the Lego friend in his pump, you know, and he was saying ‘It was really painful but I really needed my friend with me, to do PE’, you know? 

[00:23:54] And again I think all of those little things, it’s kid of us tuning in to children and thinking about what they need, and what they need in terms of supporting them with those friendships whether they’re peer friendships or imaginary friendships and providing those opportunities for those friends to be present.   Sacha, coming on to you. 

Sacha Powell:  [00:24:15] You’ve reminded me of my imaginary friend who was with me for quite a long time I seem to think, when I was probably around 3, 4, 5 years old when we moved a lot and I wonder now, with us talking about imaginary friends, whether that imaginary friend, whose name was Crudger, because his language went ‘crudge, crudge, crudge’, and I think I was the only person who could understand what he was saying, but we understood each other perfectly; I wonder whether he was a form of constancy and continuity for me, because I moved a lot when I was a little girl.  But I am also interested in this idea that you talked about, of objects and perhaps connected to Crudger being with me as I moved from lots of different places, whether that connects to, and we’ve talked about this in the past, Winnicott’s idea of transitional objects.  And I think Tina you have said that for you it became objects of transition and perhaps for me that’s what that imaginary friend partly represented.

[00:25:16] You also talked, Caron, about rehearsing friendships and perhaps we do that through our imaginary friendships but my particular research interest, for a very long time, has been in babies and toddlers.  Very little children from birth to three.   Arguably we could say that The Network for Learning, for babies and toddlers is often family, and in some cultural contexts that might be a very large, wide family.  Or it may be one or more parent or carer, and I think that we could argue that they are the baby’s first friends but also through those intimate relationships with their carers they are rehearsing many of the elements of a successful friendship or friendships that they’ll develop throughout their lives.  And I think that my interest latterly was in singing with babies and young children and I think through singing there is, as Froebel said, an affective and emotional connection that goes on which is why we know that being sung to as a baby is so much more interesting to babies than listening to music through a CD.

[00:26:31] Not that that is wrong, of course it’s not, but babies love being sung to because singing isn’t just about the sound, it’s about the facial expressions and it’s about being held, it’s about synchronising heartbeats and other physiological aspects of our bodies.  

[00:26:51] And I think that turn-taking, eye contact, negotiation, anticipation, trying to understand what the other person’s next move is going to be – All of those things are the elements of what it is to be and have friends.  We need to know how to do all of these things, so in their infancy when they’re being sung to, babies are learning all sorts of amazing things that will stand them in good stead for their friendships as well as being good at that moment in time.

[00:27:21] So I think that’s an area for me that’s been of particular interest in relation to some research that I had done with Kathy Goouch in particular around babies, and Vanessa Young as well around singing with babies.

[00:27:38] Thank you Sacha, that was really interesting to think.  As we’re all sort of talking it feels like we’re kind of all sparking off of each other and we’re all thinking of things, which is great.  You know, when you were talking about friendships as opportunities for rehearsal I thought ‘Yes!’ and then I was also thinking also thinking that friendship at that present moment and the value for it as it is, as it stands is so important.  Not just for what’s coming in the future.

[00:28:06] So that made me kind of think yes, that’s so important that we don’t just think that it’s something for practice for something in the future.  It’s the here and now and the value that that relationship has. 

[00:28:13] And also, all the links to friendship, whether that’s play, whether that’s singing, whether that’s story telling – it’s not something that sits in isolation, friendship. 

[00:28:34] [music playing]  Thank you for listening to this podcast. The second episode of this Froebelian Friendships podcast can be accessed by visiting https://research.shu.ac.uk/friends   Here you will also find more information on Caron’s research, and other related podcasts.  This podcast was made possible by a fellowship opportunity funded by Sheffield Hallam University.  [music playing]