Opal Playtimes

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 the start of 2023, we have been on a mission to improve our playtimes for the children of St Thomas Primary School. We signed up to the OPAL (Outdoor Play and Learning) programme in order to support us with this. We are now an OPAL Platinum School – though this doesn’t mean our play development stops. We will continue to work hard to keep making our children’s playtimes 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.

OPAL Action Plan

Even though we are now an OPAL Platinum School, our OPAL journey has not ended and we continue to strive to improve our OPAL playtimes. Take a look at our 2-year action plan to discover where we started and where we are continuing to develop.

Action plan 26/27 (pdf)
Action plan 25/26 (pdf)

OPAL Policy

We believe that our children’s playtimes are incredibly important to their health and well-being. For this reason, we have written a policy dedicated to OPAL Playtimes.

OPAL Play Detectives

Across KS2, we have a number of children who come out as play detectives each day and whose job it is to ensure that our playtimes run smoothly and make sure that all children have someone to play with. They also take photographs and videos of fantastic play ideas to keep us up to date and share.
Please ask any of our play detectives for help if you need anything at playtime. You will see them in a yellow hi-vis with an iPad.

Newsletters

Active Uniform Alliance

St Thomas Primary believe that traditional uniforms restrict movement, limit opportunities for active play, and don’t reflect the needs of modern learning environments. We have pledged our support to the ‘Active Uniform Alliance’ to really help us think about what makes children’s school lives even more fun and active. As a result, we now encourage black trainers to be worn every day in school as part of our uniform, especially for girls, whose shoes often don’t encourage them to climb, run etc. For more information, see: https://activeuniform.org/