The Good School Playground Guide

This Good School Playground Guide highlights the possibilities and priorities when designing and improving school grounds for play and learning. Whatever your budget or scale of ambition, this guide will help you develop outdoor spaces which will help make your school the best place to grow up in.

Investing in children’s play is one of the most important things we can do to improve children’s health and wellbeing in Scotland. Although children are playing outdoors less now than at any point in our history, most still have access to a school playground where they can play outdoors on a regular basis.

With thoughtful design, these spaces can play a significant role in improving children’s health and wellbeing. They can stimulate physical activity and encourage the development of important physical competencies. They can provide positive childhood experiences of being outdoors that we know increase the likelihood of being active outdoors in adult life. And they can create an environment that meets children’s developmental needs to explore, create, collaborate, socialise and simply to ‘be’ – all which we know are important for their emotional health.

We offer training on transforming play in your school grounds, based on the Good School Playground Guide – please visit our training pages for more.