Crowlands Primary School

Our OPAL Vision

Did you know that playtime is about 20% of every child’s day at school? That’s 1.4 years of every child’s life while they are at primary school. Therefore, OPAL’s vision is that every child in every school has an amazing hour of high-quality play every day – with no exceptions.
To help bring this vision to life, we treat our playtime as an essential aspect of children’s development which should be a source of joy and happiness.

Our OPAL Journey

Since December of 2023, we have been on a mission to improve our playtimes for the children of Crowlands Primary School. We signed up to the OPAL (Outdoor Play and Learning) programme in order to support us with this. We are now on our journey to becoming an awarded OPAL School and continually developing our playtimes and working hard to ensure our children’s playtime's as good as they can be.Playing outdoors in rich play environments is one of the best ways for children to develop social skills, build resilience, make more friends, be more creative and care more about the planet. Right now, this is more important than ever.

For these reasons, improving our children’s playtime and making them the highest quality that they can be is crucial to us.
We are very excited to participate in the Outdoor Play and Learning (OPAL) primary programme, which is endorsed and supported by Sport England and runs in hundreds of schools across the UK and worldwide.

You can watch a video of how the OPAL programme has helped transform school playtimes here and read more on the OPAL website.