That’s according to Dr Brendon Hyndman, a senior lecturer in Personal Development, Health and Physical Education (PDHPE) in the Charles Sturt School of Education, who has just co-developed a national position statement on The importance of school recess for active play, in collaboration with the Australian Council for Health, Physical Education and Recreation (ACHPER).
The first national position statement of its kind in Australia, it is essentially a call to schools to provide a minimum of two recess recreation periods (which includes lunch breaks) daily.
“The statement recognises that school recesses provide an important opportunity to support children’s intellectual, physical, social and emotional development with specific opportunities to strengthen their health and wellbeing,” Hyndman says.
“… [and] what the position statement refers to very much aligns with health and physical education curriculum, and brings attention to that ‘R’ letter in ACHPER around ‘recreation’ and what can be further considered and done by schools in that space.”
In the ‘80s ‘90s and into the 2000s, Hyndman explains, recesses were traditionally seen as a time mainly for kids to let off steam.
“It’s been referred to as ‘a break from real learning’ and going back into those decades, it was the first thing that would get restricted and/or taken from a student if a teacher wasn’t really happy with behaviour – the students really value that time.
“But what we’re finding, and there’s more and more scholars now studying this, is that recess time is incredibly powerful in relation to the classroom.”
If children have the opportunity to engage in something they enjoy and can apply their mind to, Hyndman says, then that can really flow into the classroom – they’re content, they’re feeling good, they’ve had their outlets met, physically, emotionally and socially, and they’re ready to lock into more learning.
Having previously been a long-term teacher himself, and returned for a period in the classroom last year, Hyndman says educators are “absolutely bombarded with planning and preparing resources and meetings etc, and with continuing teacher shortages, and covering off bases, it’s really, really tough”.
But with extensive research showing that unstructured play can positively impact cognitive development, social and emotional health, physical health and improve attention, along with promoting healthy brain development, emotional stability and resiliency, empathy, feelings of wellbeing, motor skills, self-regulation and improvements in executive function, an ongoing and committed time allocation in schools should be a priority.
The position statement advocates a minimum of one-hour provision of unstructured, active play for recess recreation time, with multiple recess periods provided.
Hyndman says a ‘big factor’ curtailing optimal recess delivery is the lack of focus this assumes in teacher accreditation and preparation.
Everything that a person is prepared for in primary and secondary schools is very much tailored towards the timetable classes, he says, and more prioritisation is required in ITE courses to cover the benefits of play beyond early childhood years and to align this with designated key learning areas.
The position statement advocates that there is a need to further enhance and develop teacher preparation in relation to identifying and encouraging positive play opportunities beyond the early years which align with the HPE curriculum content F-10.
“Getting out there and having that engagement with nature as well as disconnecting from screens, that’s a whole other realm of health benefits,” Hyndman says.
The position statement also claims there needs to be high quality, well-resourced professional development opportunities for teachers to recognise and encourage quality play opportunities and positively respond to students during recess periods.
With teachers already time-poor, Hyndman suggests support staff can be of great assistance here.
“In my recent teaching experiences, amongst those supporting the teachers, so learning assistants or teacher support staff, I’ve seen some really great examples to help really push and facilitate learning development during those recess periods, so there could be more scope there,” he says.
The statement says “the main characteristics of play include being self-chosen, self-directed, have elements of imagination, and be transformative without a pre-determined set of outcomes to work towards”.
All students, it reads, need access to regular and sustained periods of recreational recess time to break up prolonged periods of sitting in a classroom, but that it also needs to be unstructured.
“There’s so much structure these days, we’ve had parents and in some studies refer to how that’s increasing the limitations on a child’s ability to explore and be spontaneous and use their imaginations,” Hyndman explains.
“There have been reports of that getting more stifled, so that’s where it’s just really important not only to get them outside, but really having that spontaneous engaging in what do they think and feel and see and relate to, and skills that can be transferred elsewhere.
“It’s a whole different skill-set than what they’re often going to be using the majority of time within the scheduled timetable classes.”
Critically, the recreation time is time away from screens and the four walls of the classroom.
“Getting out there and having that engagement with nature as well as disconnecting from screens, that’s a whole other realm of health benefits,” Hyndman continues.
“If the students are getting that break from screens and feeling more restored, then you can imagine when they return to these scheduled timetable classes where they’ve got to engage with their laptops or tablets, with tests happening or assessments, then you would expect that the better the quality of those recess periods, there’s that conversion not only back into the classroom but outside that as well.”
To read the national position statement, click here.