Breaktime and the School

Understanding and Changing Playground Behaviour

Peter Blatchford, Sonia Sharp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781138421516
• eBook ISBN: 9781134854738
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Breaktime in the school is a period when pupils learn social skills they will need in the world outside. But it can also be an occasion for aggression, harassment and bullying. Breaktime and the School gives an accessible account of the latest research into children's play and behaviour. The contributors show how an understanding of the area can inform practical action in designing an environment which encourages positive behaviour, in effective management and supervision, and in involving the children themselves in decision-making and conflict resolution. Staff in primary and secondary schools, school governors deciding on budget allocations, as well as local education authority advisers will find the book essential reading.

Part I
Understanding behaviour during school breaktimes

Editors’ introduction

Much can be learned about children from studying their behaviour in playground settings. Behaviour there is in a sense natural, and because of changes in leisure activities and parental fears for their children’s safety, it may be for some children one of the few outside settings within which they do play and interact. The playground offers the opportunity to examine a children’s ‘culture’, separate from adults and sometimes in opposition to the culture that operates within the classroom.

Yet there has been relatively little research on school playground behaviour, and some of this research has been anecdotal and small-scale. The aim of this first part of the book is to draw together and assess what is known from research about playground behaviour.

Peter Blatchford sets out to provide a review of what research there has been. He first of all contrasts the two different views that seem to characterise most research and comment. The first view emphasises what pupils learn and enjoy in the playground, while the second view stresses more the problems that arise. He argues that these two views have different implications for what role adults should adopt in the school playground. Following an account of pupils’ descriptions of their playground activities, there is a discussion of two main themes about which there is debate: whether or not traditional games are in decline and whether or not there has been a decline in the quality of outside play. One conclusion is that it is all too easy to underestimate pupils’ resourcefulness. He then looks at research on some specific and emerging areas of interest: gender differences, social relations in the playground— including teasing and name calling, fighting, friendships, rejected and isolated children, power and status and fair play—staff-pupil relations and differences between schools. The chapter ends with a look at research methods that can be used in examining playground behaviour in a systematic fashion.

Ask anyone to say what children are doing in the school playground, at least at primary level, and they will probably answer that they are ‘playing’. But what do we know about this seemingly trivial behaviour?

A good deal, it seems, and we are pleased that Professor Peter Smith of Sheff ield Univer sity, who has devoted many years to understanding play behaviour better, has examined for us what pupils can learn from their play experiences and games in the playground, and what adults can learn from examining pupils’ behaviour. He looks at age developments in outside play and types of activities, and what these tell us about child development; he examines differences and similarities between rule-governed and pretend play; and he contrasts competing explanations for gender and ethnic differences. Peter Smith finishes with a discussion of what children acquire in the playground, and what the value of breaktime might be. He concludes that the unique learning opportunities provided by play and games are in the social domain, certainly by middle childhood when rule-governed games and team games are common.

Michael Boulton’s chapter is based on his growing and thorough research on school playground behaviour. He concentrates on two main forms of behaviour—playful and aggressive fighting—and shows how there is an ambiguity about such behaviour which makes it difficult for adults to judge accurately which is which. Another term used for playful fighting is ‘rough-and-tumble’ play, and Michael Boulton examines explanations for why children—particularly boys—engage in it. In a helpful discussion, he highlights the main dif ferences between fighting and rough-and-tumble play, but also points out that these differences are not always straightforward; for example, in the case of the minority of children who fail to recognise the differences. Disturbingly, it seems that female adults are especially likely to perceive playful episodes as aggressive, and one consequence of this is the negative way that play fighting is viewed by many playground supervisors. This has unfortunate consequences, and Michael Boulton argues for more training and more toleration, given the possible value of play fighting and the obvious enjoyment pupils find in it. He also offers the reader the opportunity to see whether they can accurately judge two vignettes as either playful or aggressive, and, in the spirit of a detective story, leaves us to wait until the end to see whether we were right or not.

In the last chapter in Part I of the book, Elinor Kelly examines a dark side of playground interactions. She makes a number of important points. She argues that pupils’ behaviour is best seen from the perspectives of pupils themselves, and draws on recent studies to illuminate how sexism and racism are embedded in interpersonal and inter-group relations. She argues that in the playground one can see pupils testing out what they know about equality and justice, and the differences between ethnic groups and boys and girls, and she shows how individuals can suffer as a consequence. She draws an important distinction between bullying—about which there has been much recent interest and research—and harassment, which is more common. The former is characterised by being intensely personal in mistreatment of victims, whereas harassment can be impersonal, and is more acceptable because it is legitimised by attitudes and structures in the school and society. It is more connected with group dynamics: with conformity within groups and aggression towards other groups. Elinor Kelly concludes on a constructive note, by arguing that many lessons have been learnt about how schools can reinforce and structure inequalities in society, and that they can get pupils to deal with racist and sexist harassment by focusing on the playground as a site of significant social learning.

Chapter 1
Research on children’s school playground behaviour in the United Kingdom

A review

Peter Blatchford

In this chapter I will review research on behaviour in school playgrounds. The chapter will aim to highlight research and views that have been influential, and identify areas for future research. It will:

1. look at two contrasting views on the nature of playground behaviour;
2. examine some specific areas of interest—behaviour in secondary school playgrounds, gender differences, social relations in the playground (teasing and name calling, fighting, friendships, rejected and isolated children, power and status, fair play)—staff-pupil interactions and differences between schools;
3. end by considering methods of researching playground behaviour.

WHAT IS KNOWN ABOUT CHILDREN’S PLAYTIME BEHAVIOUR?

There is a strong case for the view that there is too little basic research in all areas of education. But there seems an especially large gap between the major role breaktime occupies in children’s school lives, on the one hand, and the dearth of research on the other. This situation no doubt owes much to the marginalised position of playtime—and to the sense that it does not really matter in the way that classroom experiences do. Yet the recent growth of research on bullying is an indication of what can happen when something is perceived as a ‘problem’.

WHAT CAN RESEARCH TELL US ABOUT PLAYGROUND BEHAVIOUR?

In reviewing the research that does exist I have been struck by the contrast between two seemingly opposing views about play ground behaviour. The first one might characterise as the ‘romantic’ view, in that emphasis is on what children learn and enjoy at playtime. The second might be called the ‘problem’ view, in the sense that the focus is on problems that arise. These two views have important and different implications for perspectives and policies on playtime.

The ‘romantic’ view

We have some splendid descriptions of children’s playground activities. Iona and Peter Opie’s book Children’s Games in Street and Playground, published in 1969, has been influential. It is a marvellous documentation of the colourful and resourceful games played by children across the country. The Opies describe varieties of chasing, catching, seeking, hunting, racing, duelling, exerting, daring, guessing, acting and pretending games. It is worth quoting the Opies in order to capture something of their distinctive approach to children’s games. They see the function of the game as largely social: ‘Just as the shy man reveals himself by his formalities, so does the child disclose his unsureness of his place in the world by welcoming games with set procedures, in which his relationships with his fellows are clearly established’ (1969:3). Part of the appeal of the game is that it creates a situation which is under the player’s control and yet is also one where the outcome is not fully known.

Games can be of great antiquity:

The custom of turning round a blindfold player three times before allowing him to begin chasing seems already to have been standard practice in the seventeenth century…. The strategem of making players choose one of two objects, such as ‘orange’ or ‘lemon’, to decide which side they shall take in a pulling match, was almost certainly employed by the Elizabethans.

(1969:7)

One of the Opies’ central themes is that control of the games has to be with children themselves; adults play no useful role and can only get in the way. There is the notion of children creating a kind of counter-culture, alien to that of adults and mysterious to them. It is particular to children of primary age. Even by their early teens children seem to have forgotten the games and lost the incentive to play.

Sluckin’s book Growing Up in the Playground (1981) is exclusively concerned with the school playground. Like the Opies, he sees the playground as a world of rules and rituals where very little has changed over the years. Sluckin argues that there are strong incentives to acquire, in an informal way, sophisticated skills in order to play many games. He gives the example of the speed and accuracy of children’s mental arithmetic —even of those struggling in maths in class—as they count ahead in dips.

For Sluckin, what the playground offers children is the opportunity for peer interaction in the context of which many lessons relevant to adult life are learnt. ‘They learn how to join in a game, how to choose and avoid rules, how to deal with people who cheat or make trouble, and above all else how to manipulate situations to their own advantage’ (1981:119).

Grugeon (1988, 1991) has more recently added to the positive view. She agrees with the Opies that the oral transmission of games and rhymes is child-initiated and out of the hands of adults. She feels that games are a powerful means of transmitting cultural information, particularly about gender. She argues that its secret nature makes it difficult for adults to see and that, despite what she feels are claims to the contrary, traditional games are still common, though this seems to be true only of young girls, who use games as a means of empowerment against boys.

The ‘Problem’ view

This predominantly positive view of playground life stands in contrast to a more negative view of playground activity. This is a view more in line with the tone of teachers’ comments (see Introduction). It stems from several disparate types of work and comment on pupils’ school behaviour.

One influence was the general concern about behaviour in schools, particularly expressed by the teacher unions and the press, that gathered momentum over the 1980s and culminated in the reporting of the Elton Committee of Inquiry into Discipline in Schools (DES 1989). Problems arising during lunchtime were identified by the Elton Committee, and recommendations for management—in particular, its funding—were offered. Yet it could be that the Elton Committee underestimated difficult behaviour on the school site because it concentrated on behaviour within school, and moreover through teachers’ perceptions. The effect of the playground on children’s behaviour was therefore neglected.

Another influence on the negative view has been the recent growth of work on bullying. There is not space to review this research here (cf. Elliott 1991; La Fontaine 1991; Tattum 1993; Tattum and Lane 1989; Whitney and Smith 1993). There is a general recognition that bullying has been neglected and that it is more prevalent than was once thought. Bullying also tends to take place away from adults, and the majority of incidents occur in the grounds around the school (cf. Blatchford 1993).

The murder of a British Asian boy in a Manchester high school showed how violence, possibly racially motivated, could erupt in school playgrounds. It led to the Burnage Inquiry (Macdonald 1989) and a survey of name calling and teasing in schools (Kelly and Cohn 1988). Other work, to be reviewed below, has also studied teasing, fighting and name calling in school playgrounds (Mooney et al. 1991).

Another influence has been the widespread recognition that desultory and aggressive behaviour may be understandable reactions in an enclosed, bare enclosure that offers little to children. Many organisations and staf f in individual schools have stressed this point, and have worked hard to show ways that school grounds can be improved and their potential realised (see Chapters 5 and 6, on playground design, in this book).

These separate strands, taken together, stress a different view of playground behaviour from those of the Opies and Sluckin. They put emphasis on behaviours occurring in the playground that are not beneficial, which can be harmful, and to which alternatives should be sought.

It is unlikely that these views—the ‘romantic’ and the ‘problem’—are mutually exclusive. More likely, they are two sides of the same coin. As Sutton-Smith and Kelly-Byrne (1984) have argued, much outside play can also be seen as part of a struggle for domination, control and sheer terrorisation by stronger of weaker children. Interestingly, both positive and negative views indicate the existence within schools of a playground culture, different from, and in many ways in opposition to, the culture and rules that operate within the school.

But they also reflect important and different assumptions about the appropriate role of adults. The positive view, as represented by the Opies and Sluckin, carries with it the assumption that adults have no role in the pupils’ playground culture.

In the present day we assume children have lost the ability to entertain themselves, we become concerned, and are liable by our concern, to make what is not true a reality. In the long run nothing extinguishes self-organised play more effectively than does activity to promote it.

(Opie and Opie 1969:16)

The problem view, on the other hand, tends to put the focus on appropriate forms of adult intervention and supervision. One can see this in the recommendations of the Elton Committee, the schemes to combat bullying (for example, Elliott 1991; Smith and Thompson 1991), and the recent growth of training courses for lunchtime supervisors (for instance, Fell, this volume; Newcastle Education Committee 1990; OPTIS 1986).

PUPILS’ DESCRIPTIONS OF THEIR PLAYGROUND ACTIVITIES

Adults f ace particular difficulties in understanding much of what goes on in the playground. Sometimes when in a school playground an observer can record individual behaviours, but remain unclear how they fit together—for example, what the game is and how it is played. Many staff have remarked how difficult it is sometimes to know whether children are playing or fighting. Who better, then, to act as informants than the pupils themselves?

In the Institute of Education study the children were asked to name and describe the three games they played in the playground. Full details of the methods used to classify games and the results found are given in Blatchford et al. (1990).

I want to concentrate here on the frequency with which different games were reported by the children. There were three clear levels of frequency. The single most common game was football, played by 60 per cent of the children. The two other most common games were the basic chasing game of ‘It’, ‘He’ or ‘Had’ (46 per cent) and other ball games (32 per cent) like netball, basketball, cricket and so on.

There...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: UNDERSTANDING BEHAVIOUR DURING SCHOOL BREAKTIMES
• PART II: CHANGING BEHAVIOUR DURING SCHOOL BREAKTIMES