At our recent Back to School Night, our Head Teacher, Geraldine Maidment, spoke to parents about something that sits at the heart of an Annemount education: the power of play. She often begins by asking a simple question: What did you love playing as a child? Almost everyone remembers the same thing: playing outdoors, with a sense of freedom, and their parents nowhere in sight.

That memory tells us something important. As Maria Montessori put it, “play is the work of the child.” Play is not simply something children do, it is how they learn about themselves, about other people and about the world around them. When children roam, imagine, negotiate and invent their own games, they learn to cooperate, to take turns, to persevere when something doesn’t work, and to put a disagreement right. These are the foundations of skills they will draw on for life.

This is why unstructured play, and time playing with other children, matters so much. Left to sort out their own games, children have to communicate, listen and solve problems for themselves. As adults, we can be so quick to step in that we accidentally take away that chance. Researchers Iona and Peter Opie, who spent years studying children’s play, found that children left to their own devices often developed more perseverance and self-discipline than those whose free time was constantly organised for them.

It doesn’t take expensive toys, either. Give a child a cardboard box and it becomes a house. A stick becomes a wand. A blanket becomes a den. The resource isn’t the important part, the imagination is.

At Annemount, we see the benefits of play every day: it develops children’s thinking, their social and emotional confidence, and their physical control, while feeding creativity, language and resilience. And when children repeat the same game again and again, they aren’t wasting time, they are practising, refining and developing mastery.

So the question we return to, as educators and parents, is a simple one: are we valuing play as highly as we value other forms of learning? As George Bernard Shaw said, “we don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” Play isn’t a break from learning. Play is learning. Perhaps the most powerful thing we can give a child is the time, space and freedom to play.