An exploration of outdoor play and wellbeing in Northern Irish primary schools

This is reflected in increasingly poor physical and mental health outcomes resulting from a sedentary, indoor lifestyle (Mental Health Foundation, 2016; NICCY, 2018; RCPCH, 2017; The State of Child Health Report, 2017). Outdoor play – if delivered meaningfully – has the potential to alleviate these negative outcomes.

For many local children, the school playground is the only accessible outdoor space available to them on a regular basis and is therefore a critical site in terms of promoting wellbeing. By applying the Affordances framework (Gibson, 1979), this thesis argues that the school playground shapes the way in which children access outdoor play through its physical, policy and social setup. The research takes an explorative approach which asks how children and teachers view and experience play within these spaces, using mixed methods to gather data via a survey (n=150), semi-structured interviews (n=10) and mosaic methods with children across 3 schools in the Greater Belfast area (n=33).