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5. How Playwork in the United Kingdom Coped with Covid-19 and the 23 March Lockdown

Chapter of: Play in a Covid Frame: Everyday Pandemic Creativity in a Time of Isolation(pp. 97–118)

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Metadata
Title5. How Playwork in the United Kingdom Coped with Covid-19 and the 23 March Lockdown
ContributorPete King(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0326.05
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0326/chapters/10.11647/obp.0326.05
Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightKing, Pete;
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2023-06-01
Long abstractThis chapter outlines how playwork and playworkers in the UK coped during Covid-19, particularly the March 2020 lockdown. It begins by briefly explaining the nature of playwork, its historical origins and playwork as a community of practice before considering some of the challenges facing playwork during the early days of Covid-19. The chapter is based on four empirical studies which were part of an eighteen-month longitudinal study, undertaken as playwork, and playworkers, were experiencing Covid-19 in the ‘here and now’. It provides a clear descriptive account of how playwork settings operated pre-Covid-19, during lockdown and when playwork settings re-opened in July 2020. There is also a specific study of the play service in Torfaen, Wales, which typified how playwork had to adapt to continue to operate. The nature of playwork, and how it continually adapts, reflects the historical origins of both the nineteenth-century play clubs and the 1950s adventure playground development.
Page rangepp. 97–118
Print length22 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Keywords
  • playwork
  • playworkers
  • UK
  • Covid-19
  • lockdown
  • community of practice
  • empirical studies
  • longitudinal study
  • descriptive account
  • playwork settings
  • pre-Covid-19
  • re-opening
  • Torfaen
  • Wales
  • adaptation
  • historical origins
  • play clubs
  • adventure playground development
Contributors

Pete King

(author)
senior lecturer at Swansea University
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0273-8191

Pete King, PhD is a senior lecturer at Swansea University, Wales, and programme director for the MA developmental and therapeutic play course. Pete is the co-editor of the two volumes of Researching Play from a Playwork Perspective (2018; 2022) with colleague Dr Shelly Newstead, and co-author of The Play Cycle: Theory, Research and Application (2020) with the late Gordon Sturrock. He has developed an observational tool, the Play Cycle Observation Method (PCOM), which records the process of play that underpins the Play Cycle. In March 2020, when the UK went into lockdown, Pete started what turned out to be an eighteen-month longitudinal study on how playwork and playworkers coped with Covid-19 and lockdown.

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