‘Physical spaces, both outside and indoors, should be constantly reviewed to incorporate a wide range of responsive, familiar, and exciting new play opportunities.

(Realising the Ambition 2020) 

National guidance and quality framework documents remind us how important it is to regularly reflect on the quality of the spaces we offer our children to support their learning through play.

To help teams with this self-evaluation work, Falkirk Council Early Learning team and NHS Forth Valley Speech and Language therapists have worked together to bring the wide and vast variety of national and local guidance and information available together into one, easy to use, audit tool.

The Falkirk Early Level Self-Evaluation Audit: Spaces tool can be used in both ELC and P1 settings, to support teams with their planning, evaluation, and moderation of high-quality play spaces.  The tool draws on all the resources already available to practitioners in Falkirk, including Realising the Ambition, enabling environments, literacy rich environments, visual communication audit tool, loose parts play, ECERS-E (2014), Kym Scott’s environment audit (2019), Marvellous Mealtimes audit, Falkirk Froebel Family advice etc. It has been split into four sections in line with Falkirk Council’s Play is the Way practitioner guidance about designing environments to support child-initiated learning.

• Section A – Enabling environments indoors and outdoors
• Section B – Social Play
• Section C – Discovery/Investigatory Play
• Section D – Creative Play

Within each section, some suggestion about areas of provision which might be found in each zone are given but these are given only as a starting guide.  Each setting should design their play spaces in the way which best suits their setting’s vision, available physical space and, the needs and interests of their learners.  Children themselves should play an active, participatory role in designing and improving their play spaces.

Falkirk Council staff and our private partner colleagues can access the Falkirk Early Level Self-Evaluation Audit: Spaces tool by downloading it from the Self- Evaluation for Self-Improvement document store within the Leadership and Management section of the Falkirk Early Learning Glow page.