I assist in supervising P1 children during their lunch break at school and one thing I have noticed is how very different the school playground is now compared to how it was when I was six years old. It is a vastly different place and, in my opinion, not a better one for it. In France the kids have plenty to play with in the school playgrounds – jump ropes, balls to throw around and they can take a toy to school if they wish – that’s my memory of school life in France as my son experienced it.

Not so here in the UK where ‘health and safety’ regulations have taken the school playground and turned it into a barren wasteland of bare concrete with nothing whatsoever thrown in for the kids to occupy themselves with. It’s BORING! and all so that little Dylan cannot get hit in the face with a ball, or little Alice does not trip over her jump rope and skin her knee…what a disaster that would be!

When I was in primary school we had these wonderful Moreton Bay Fig trees in our playground with wide spreading root bases that we climbed and used as spaceships or whatever else our imaginations could conjure up. We played with skipping ropes and ‘elastic jumps’, the boys played with marbles and the girls played with those ‘knuckles’ – you could kick a ball around, take a doll to play with…not my little charges though. All they have is a stark concrete square that they must run around in and they cannot have anything to play with in it – no ball, no jump ropes…nothing. As a result many of the kids get bored so they push others around, they swing round the lightpole for some fun and fall off it and fall against the large metal perimeter fence and hurt themselves. They chase each other for something to do and fall over and skin a knee, scrape a hand or a nose…obviously accidents still happen regardless.They are encouraged to tell you as soon as another child as much as looks at them the wrong way so that you are all the time fielding trivial complaints such as “she wont play with me…he poked my head…he pulled my hair…she bumped into me…” – when I was that age you were considered a time waster and tattle-tale for wasting the teacher’s time with such trivialities – the nuns taught us to sort minor things out among ourselves and if anything major happened one of the nuns would certainly see it in a split second – they had eyes like hawks so they saw and dealt with stuff that need dealing with.

I feel sorry for today’s kids, if they are allowed too much freedom and not have the security of strong boundaries they fall down form lack of judgement – and if they are wrapped up in cotton wool so they don’t hurt themselves they still end up in a scrapes of something or another. Either way they need to learn how to look after themselves to some degree, get a knock here and there and get up and get on with it. And have some good old fashioned fun along the way. A grazed knee is a far better option than a repressed spirit.