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OPAL School
What is OPAL?
Research has shown that children spend 20% of their time in school playing. To ensure that this time and our fantastic school grounds are used to their full potential our school has adopted an OPAL (Outdoor Play and Learning) philosophy that allows the children freedom to explore play in their own imaginative ways, often using found and gathered resources in the natural outdoor environment.
An OPAL approach promotes a more inclusive play environment in which all children can feel comfortable to express themselves. Our OPAL journey began in Spring 2025 and we are starting to build up our resources and expertise to transform our outdoor environment. A soft launch of OPAL will happen in June 2025, ready for a fuller launch in September.
The children are excited about the new outdoor opportunities that OPAL will offer, with so much more for them to do, no matter the weather! From playing with crates and dancing to music, to enjoying imaginative play in the small world area or building the next Eiffel Tower in our construction area, OPAL offers an exciting alternative to the standard playground activities.
Through this approach to play children are not only more active at lunch or break times, but they are also having the opportunity to further develop life skills such as cooperation, team work and problem solving. They are becoming motivated and enthusiastic builders, engineers, explorers and designers.
We are just at the start of our journey, but we know the positive impact this will have on our children and will work along side what the children want to make this a rich, outdoor play and learning environment.
OPAL Updates
23.5.25 We held a mufti day with donations to support fundraising and donations for OPAL. We were fortunate to receive over £200 in donations which will go towards buying an outdoor speaker for dancing and shelving for our new OPAL storage container. We also received incredible donations of Lego, fancy dress, sand toys and playground chalk. These will all be put to use when we come back from half term and launch OPAL.
19.5.25 We held our first OPAL Assembly where the children were introduced to what OPAL is and given the countdown to us launching in school - 15 school days!