Free Play is Not “Just Play”: Why Relational Pedagogy Matters in Early Childhood Education

Free play is often described as something light, spontaneous and unstructured, something children engage in when more formal learning is not taking place.

That description has always troubled me.

Across many years of working with children and families, I have repeatedly seen some of the most complex learning take place within moments that, from the outside, might appear to be “just play”. A group of children building a den may be negotiating space, relationships, materials and competing ideas. A child repeatedly transporting objects from one area to another may be exploring pattern, connection and possibility. Two children absorbed in an imaginary family game may be working through relationships, emotions or experiences that they cannot yet fully articulate.

Play can look simple. What is happening within it often is not.

Play Is Not Separate From Learning

From a Froebelian perspective, play has never been understood as an optional addition to learning.

Friedrich Froebel placed self-activity, exploration and play at the centre of children’s development. His educational philosophy challenged the idea that knowledge should simply be transmitted from adult to child, instead recognising children as active participants in their own development (Froebel, 1887).

Contemporary Froebelian scholarship continues this tradition. McNair and Powell (2021) describe Froebel’s philosophy as one that respected children’s self-activity and positioned play as a primary medium for learning. Bruce (2012) similarly places play within a holistic understanding of early childhood education, where development cannot easily be separated into isolated areas.

From this perspective, play is not preparation for learning. It is one of the ways learning happens.

That distinction matters because if play is understood mainly as preparation for something more important later, its value is always measured against what comes next. If, instead, we recognise play as meaningful in the present, we begin to see the child differently too. The child is not waiting to become a learner. They are already thinking, interpreting, experimenting and making meaning.

What Makes Play Relational?

I increasingly understand free play through the lens of relational pedagogy.

Children do not learn in isolation. Their understanding develops through relationships with other children, adults, materials, spaces, experiences and ideas. A block is not simply a block when two children decide it is a phone. A blanket becomes a roof because children agree that it does. A stick can become a wand, a spoon, a fishing rod or something entirely different because meaning is being created and negotiated together.

Hedges and Cooper (2018) describe relational play-based pedagogy as a form of teaching in which practitioners draw on professional knowledge and judgement to engage thoughtfully with children’s interests and thinking within play.

This challenges a common misunderstanding about free play. Free play does not mean the absence of pedagogy, nor does it mean that the practitioner becomes irrelevant. Instead, the pedagogy is often subtle, responsive and relational.

The Complexity of the Practitioner’s Role

There is a persistent idea that if children are leading their own play, the adult should simply stand back.

Sometimes that is exactly what is needed. But not always.

The skilled practitioner is constantly making decisions about when to join, when to wait, when to offer language, when to introduce a new material and when their involvement might interrupt something children are perfectly capable of working through themselves.

These are pedagogical decisions. They require knowledge of child development, relationships, communication and the individual child.

Tovey (2017) emphasises the role of the adult in Froebelian practice as one of supporting rather than dominating children’s activity, while also recognising the importance of environment, relationships and thoughtful adult presence.

The adult’s role is therefore not diminished within free play. It becomes more sophisticated.

The practitioner has to be present enough to notice what is unfolding, but restrained enough not to take ownership of it.

Learning That Cannot Always Be Measured

One of the tensions within contemporary early childhood education is the pressure to make learning visible.

Practitioners are frequently expected to demonstrate progression, record learning and provide evidence of outcomes. Accountability has a legitimate place in education, but not everything important in childhood can be captured neatly.

A child beginning to trust another person, finding the confidence to join a group, learning to repair a friendship, or developing enough emotional security to move away from an adult and explore independently may be experiencing significant development. Yet these changes do not always produce an obvious product or easily measurable outcome.

Moss (2014) critiques policy approaches to early childhood that become dominated by quality measurement, investment and predetermined outcomes, arguing for more democratic and experimental possibilities within early education.

That critique feels particularly relevant to play. When play constantly has to prove what it has produced, there is a risk that we begin to value only those parts of childhood that can be documented.

When Adults Take Over the Play

Because practitioners recognise that play supports learning, there can sometimes be a temptation to make sure the learning happens.

The café suddenly needs a literacy objective. The construction area requires a numeracy outcome. The child’s imaginary world becomes an opportunity for an adult-planned question.

None of these interventions is necessarily wrong. Sensitive adult involvement can deepen thinking enormously. The difficulty arises when children’s play becomes primarily a vehicle for adult intentions.

Hedges and Cooper (2018) are useful here because their conception of relational play-based pedagogy does not position teaching and child-led play as opposites. Instead, it describes skilled interactions that emerge responsively from children’s interests and activity.

For me, the important question is not whether adults should enter children’s play, but how they do so.

Are we extending an idea that belongs to the child, or quietly replacing it with one that belongs to us?

That distinction matters.

Free Does Not Mean Without Boundaries

The term “free play” can itself be misleading.

Children’s play is never completely free from context. Adults shape environments, select resources, organise time and establish boundaries around safety and relationships. Cultural expectations and the presence of other children also influence what is possible.

Free play therefore does not mean complete freedom from structure.

For me, it means something closer to meaningful agency within a thoughtfully created environment.

Children have genuine opportunities to initiate ideas, make choices, negotiate with others, change direction and remain with experiences that matter to them.

Froebelian education places particular importance on this self-activity. McNair and Powell (2021) identify respect for children’s self-activity as central to Froebel’s continuing educational significance.

This does not remove the practitioner. It changes the relationship between adult intention and children’s agency.

Play as Communication

This becomes especially important when thinking about inclusion.

Not every child communicates most effectively through direct conversation or formal questioning. Some children communicate through movement, repeated actions, objects, imaginative scenarios, gesture, silence or observation before eventually participating.

For children with additional support needs, children developing language, or children who find direct adult interaction demanding, play may provide an important space in which communication becomes less dependent on conventional verbal forms.

Across my own practice, I have repeatedly seen children reveal aspects of themselves through play that were much harder to see in more structured situations. A child may struggle to answer a direct question about how they are feeling, but repeatedly enact separation and reunion through figures. Another may say very little during a group discussion but demonstrate sophisticated problem-solving while constructing something with a peer.

Play does not remove communication differences, but it can widen the ways in which communication and understanding become visible.

That makes the practitioner’s capacity to notice particularly important.

Relationships Are Part of the Learning

When we talk about learning, relationships are sometimes described as though they simply create the comfortable conditions in which the “real” learning can begin.

I think this misunderstands early childhood.

Relationships are part of the learning itself.

Through everyday interactions, children learn what it feels like to be heard, whether their ideas matter, how disagreement feels and how trust develops. They learn how to join a group, how to leave one, how to repair a relationship after something has gone wrong, and how to balance their own intentions with those of other people.

These experiences shape children’s developing understanding of themselves and others.

Hedges and Cooper’s (2018) relational account of play-based pedagogy is particularly helpful because it positions teaching and learning within precisely these kinds of participatory encounters.

Learning is not simply located within the individual child. It also happens between people.

What Becomes Invisible When We Narrow Learning?

If legitimate learning is defined primarily through predetermined and easily measurable outcomes, much of what happens within play becomes difficult to recognise.

Trust, belonging, curiosity, negotiation, emotional regulation, confidence, imagination and shared meaning do not necessarily unfold in straight lines. They develop through repeated experiences, often slowly and unpredictably.

Bruce’s holistic approach to early childhood education, alongside contemporary Froebelian thinking, resists the fragmentation of children’s learning into disconnected pieces (Bruce, 2012; McNair & Powell, 2021).

The child at play is simultaneously physical, emotional, cognitive, social and imaginative. Children do not experience those dimensions separately, and perhaps our pedagogy should be cautious about separating them too quickly.

Play Does Not Need to Look Productive

There is another pressure that I think early childhood education needs to resist, and that is the need for childhood to look productive.

Adults are often reassured when children’s activity produces something visible. A picture, a completed task, a model, a word, a number or something that can be placed in a folder can feel easier to recognise as learning.

But some of the richest play leaves very little behind.

A complicated imaginary story disappears when the children leave the room. A game negotiated for forty minutes produces no worksheet. A structure is built and deliberately knocked down. A collection is created and later scattered.

Nothing tangible remains, but the learning did not disappear simply because there is nothing to display.

This is where professional observation and judgement matter.

The skilled practitioner does not need every meaningful experience to become a product. Sometimes recognising what has happened is enough.

Reframing Free Play

Perhaps we therefore need to reconsider what we mean when we describe children as “just playing”.

Within play, children are continually exploring both themselves and the social world around them. They experiment with ideas, negotiate relationships, experience disagreement and repair, create and reshape rules, and transform ordinary materials through imagination. A cardboard box can become a house, a boat or a veterinary surgery, while an invented game can become a space in which children explore friendship, fairness, power, fear or belonging.

What appears spontaneous on the surface can involve highly complex processes of meaning-making. Children are not simply filling time. They are interpreting experiences, testing possibilities and constructing understanding with others.

This is why I find the idea of free play as relational pedagogy so powerful. It moves us beyond the false divide between adult teaching and child-led play and asks instead how professional knowledge, thoughtful environments and children’s agency can work together.

The question is no longer whether the adult should teach or the child should play. It becomes a more useful pedagogical question: how can adults remain attentive, responsive and available without taking ownership of the meanings children are creating for themselves?

Concluding Reflection

Free play should not have to justify itself by pretending to be something else.

It does not need to become disguised literacy, disguised numeracy or an adult learning objective hidden inside an activity children appear to have chosen.

Children will encounter language, mathematics, science, relationships, movement and creativity within rich play because their worlds are already full of these things.

The practitioner’s task is to recognise those possibilities without taking them over.

For me, this is where relational pedagogy becomes most visible. The adult is neither absent nor dominant, and the child is neither left unsupported nor controlled. Learning emerges through the relationship between children, adults, environments, materials and shared experience.

Free play is therefore not a break from education. It is one of the conditions through which meaningful early education becomes possible.

And perhaps when we stop asking children to prove that they are learning while they play, we become much better able to see just how much learning was there all along.