Loose Parts Play
Enhancing Personal Capacity Building and Climate Awareness of Pupils in Schools
Sharing practical resources, stories and evidence from schools in four countries.
Abundant evidence points to the positive impact of play in schools. The introduction of loose parts brings even more benefit and richness to children's experience.
"It transforms the playground before your eyes!"
Welcome to the Loose Parts Play website, designed to share the experience of schools in Hungary, Poland, Scotland and Slovakia when they introduced loose parts play. We invite you to join our journey of discovery into the wonderful world of loose parts!
The loose parts play project ran from 2020 to 2023 and combined playful, practical and research approaches to introducing loose parts play into schools.
Our resources and evidence will be useful to anyone interested in bringing more play into schools, including teachers, support staff, school leaders, parents and carers, local and national government teams, play organisations and academics.
The project resources are free to download from this website, to help you introduce and expand opportunities for loose parts play.
Our project resources
We have developed a range of tools to help you bring Loose Parts Play (LPP) into your school - click on the icons below to be taken to the relevant section.
Supports schools to introduce loose parts play into their daily routines.
Contains many helpful resources such as posters, templates and checklists to use right away.
Covers the use of the toolbox and the manual, and it is developed for teacher-training specialist.
Summarises our project activities and assesses the impact of play on the lives of children and school communities.
Loose parts are often scrap, natural or recycled materials - making them low-cost, easily available, ever-changing, inclusive and friendly to the environment. Loose parts can be used in any number of ways, they don’t have a predetermined use, and it doesn’t matter if they are destroyed during play. They can be small like twigs and corks or large like tyres, wooden pallets and tarpaulins.
An object or material comes into the category of loose parts if it is available to be used freely, set loose from its original purpose. Children can play with it, manipulate it, move it and combine it with other objects or materials as they choose.
The term ‘loose parts’ is not new – it came into widespread use after the publication of Simon Nicholson’s article The Theory of Loose Parts: How NOT to Cheat Children (1971).
Project partners
The project involved outstanding individuals and organisations from four European countries - Hungary, Poland, Scotland and Slovakia. For more than 30 months, four primary schools and four Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) worked together to produce new resources, from their direct experience - bringing the wide-ranging benefits of more play, to more children!
