To mark Playday, the national day for play on Wednesday 7 August 2024, Home-Start and John Lewis Partnership are launching the next element to their award-winning Healthy Happy Home programme on inclusive play.  

This new course will join the three Health Happy Home courses that were launched in 2022 - sleep, food and nutrition and financial wellbeing.  

The course has been developed with play specialists PEDAL - the centre for research on Play in Education, Development and Learning at the University of Cambridge and will include videos, animations and resources for volunteers.

Play was identified as a priority for new training resources following research with Home-Starts.

Home-Start UK conducted research with Home-Starts across the UK, which included a dedicated workshop with Home-Start volunteers led by John Lewis Partnership’s Futurologist, which included activities with the volunteers to understand the impact of their work on early childhood development and long-term health and wellbeing. 

This research clearly identified and further evidenced the in-home and societal needs linked to play across the UK for families with children under five for social, emotional and cognitive learning and development, finding:  

·       99% of volunteers believe that play is fundamental to helping a child build emotional bonds and connections with the parents and with others

·       90% of volunteers felt that some parents struggle to play with their child.      

·       The Top 3 barriers to play for Home-Start families identified were;

o   Lack of knowledge and/or awareness of the benefits of play

o   Mental health issues

o   Parental time pressures

The new Healthy Happy Home module will raise awareness of the importance of play in early years for social, emotional and cognitive learning and development. It will also raise awareness on the opportunities within the family environment to support play and how to take a neurodiversity-affirming approach to play. It will empower volunteers with the awareness and tools to help support families with play.

Hannah Morowa, Home-Start UK Head of Support for Families said: “Play is at the heart of every healthy happy home and is every child’s right. For some children and families, finding the space for play can feel particularly challenging. Neurodivergent children are sometimes misunderstood as not being able to play, their preferences for play sometimes seen as wrong or lacking and some games and toys might inadvertently exclude them.”  

So far over 6,000 volunteers have signed up to the courses with the potential of reaching over 12,000 families. (* Based on the assumption that Home-Visiting volunteers support on average 2 families per year.) 

The previous courses were developed with experts from The Lullaby Trust, The Sleep Charity, The Money Charity, Waitrose Cookery School, John Lewis Finance and Wellbeing Services, and the course won the Best Project category in May 2023 at the Business Charity Awards. 

The new training module will be launched later this year and will be available to Home-Start volunteer through their new online Learning Centre. 

The new module will be launched later this year and will be available to Home-Start volunteers through their new online Learning Centre.  

Nathalie Winn, Health and Community Impact Manager at the John Lewis Partnership, said: “It can be hard to define what play is, but play matters. It supports children’s learning and development, making sense of the world, themselves and the people around them. We are thrilled to have been able to grow the Healthy Happy Home programme further with Home-Start UK, supporting another area of need with expert content from PEDAL.”