 Thank you so much for the introduction and I want to thank the Burner Bandbear Foundation and all the organisers for inviting me here. I am really excited to be here. I am going to be talking a little bit more about play. We heard Selva say some things about play and why it matters and particularly how we embrace uncertainty and risk in children's play. ond dyna o'r ffordd o'n bwysig ar gyfer o bobl a'i bywysig, byddwn ni'n bod li o'r ffordd o'r rheidiau polls eu goreidio ar gyfer o wybodau mae'r bywysig ar gael ar y dyfodol o'r bywysig a'r bywysig ar gael ar gael o'r bywysig ar gael o'r bywysig ar gael o'r bywysig, rydym ni'n ddal gael eu bywysig ar ar enrychiadun nhw, cynliadau heatys. Mae oedd cyfnod eich cyfnodot yn holl Shineyllol. Mae gael y saldo cyho Strannur, yn holl neid felly rgersear, lot yr lle o tylus yn nhw. Y dŵr intenser yn firmento. Frydych'r by lunis ar om rheson o y typi yma ychydig erosi, a i rhesyni'r byd yn bryd y sleid? serum ydyn ni i'n brafin cynllun o ran hyn plissu leitho. ac rwy'n cael ei dweud o'r hwn o'r ddweud o'r cyflawn y wneud, yn y cyflawn o'r hollwn, o'r cyflawn o'r cyflawn, o'r ddaf yn yr ymdweud o'r ddweud, ac yn y cyflawn i'r ddechrau, yn allan o'r gweithio. A gael, ydych chi'n ei wneud o'r cilydd, a'n mwy o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r cyflawn, these are the kind of spaces that we offer to children. So I want you to see the contrast between this powerful learning and adaptive impulse of children and these kind of spaces. And I want to suggest that we can do better. So I want to help you see a little bit more about this rich learning impulse called play. Ac i fi wnaeth i chi'n gweithio'r fideofratidgi. Felly, ydy'r fideo sy'n gweithio gyda'r four-year-old oed yn eich fforist, a mae'n cael ei fforist o'r ddeud. Mae'r idea efallai'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'r fforist i'w medri. Ond efallai eich fforist yn ôl, eich cyfnodd yn gwneud yn ei gweithio'n gweithio i'r llwyddol i'r eich cyfnodd. Felly, wrth gwerth mae'n adwy淵en i bobl yn y bryd yn chyflwydoedd i gobl gwaith ac chi'n gwybod unig o'i bod yn cychyn i'n gweithio fyddfa ar ystod. ac mae'n bwysig arweithio魚f nhw, a'n bwysig i'n mynd o i'n amlwg fyddfa'r gwahaniaeth fydd rydych chi'n gweithio'n gweithio. Gwyddo they getting from the experience? What are the... What's these experiences helping to equip them for their lives as children and as adults? So, I will cross my fingers for the technology, I will give my thumbs up to the technician and we will see the video now. Okay, so what I now want you to do is to turn to the person next to you a i dwi'n credu roi'r ddweud y celf. Sy'n gweithio'r ddweud yw'r ddweud mewn gweld y gallu rhoi'r oed fy hun o'r ddweud o'i oed yn gyffrind yn cael eu maen nhw. Ond dwi'n gweithio nad ymlaen i'n cael eu ddweud Rhaid i fydda i chi, byddwch i celfio ddweud y hoffs. Ymlaen i chi'n dda chi ddweud yn cael ddweud Onw'r ddweud i'w wneud y celf. Rhai oed yn modd ychydig os yw gweithiaeth I'm going to look for some nods or some shakes. I hope you were talking about the children having fun. They were enjoying what they were doing. They were engaged. They were, of course, moving and using their bodies, learning what their bodies could do. They were balancing. They were working as a team. They all came together to clear away the branches. They were communicating with each other. There was a lot of talking going on. They were figuring out the risks. They were managing the risks. They could feel that this was a challenge. This was adventurous. This was a little bit dangerous. They couldn't just run across that tree. They had to go across carefully. They were learning to manage the risks in that situation. Let's think a little bit about that girl at the back. I hope you are watching the girl at the back. She didn't cross the tree. She didn't go across. Maybe she felt a little bit sad. Maybe she will try again next time. Maybe she will cross. Maybe she won't cross. Maybe she is just a cautious girl. But here's the thing. She learned. What did she learn from that experience? She learned what it feels like to be outside your comfort zone. To be somewhere where you don't feel safe. She could feel that in her stomach. She did something about it. She got out of that unsafe situation. She got to a place where she felt safe again. That was a resilient response. It was overcoming that challenge. If you think about these girls, they are four years old now. If you think about them, they are not four years old and they are in the woods. Maybe they are 16 or 17 years old and they are going to their first party. Then you are saying, are these young people ready to deal with challenges? Do they know what it feels like to be unsafe and how to get out of an unsafe situation? A lot of those experiences are very powerful and very valuable for us. Here's the thing. Some of that learning only happened because of the risks. Yes, because it was a little bit dangerous. Because the children were not sure that they could get across. If you try to make it completely safe, then the children would not have so much interest. They would not be so excited. They would not feel that sense of achievement at the end. They would not have that learning about how to deal with risky situations. I hope you can see how learning to deal with risk and uncertainty runs through children's play like blood through their veins. There's a connection here because as children grow up, they gradually become better at things. They become more responsible. They learn their own capacities. They can get very good at things. One of the things that happens in childhood is a gradual transfer of responsibility from adults to children. That transfer of responsibility starts happening at a pretty early age. But if we make the steps too hard, if we manage the risks and we do all the things for children too much and for too long, then sooner or later the step gets big and it can get too big. So we leave children unable to cope with responsibility when they get older. That's one of the reasons why uncertainty and risk are or should be at the heart of our thinking about children's play and children's lives. So I showed you one picture of a playground earlier. This is another playground from England. I hope you agree it's really not up to the job. This was built maybe in the 1990s, but now I'm going to show you a picture of another public playground. This was built in London in 2012. This is the Tumbly Bay playground in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London. It's one of the most high profile playgrounds that's been built. I hope you agree it looks a little bit different to the playground I just showed you. Here is another scene from this playground. It's a really rich environment. It's challenging. It invites children to explore, to get lost, to climb, to find out how things work. There is some danger in this playground. These are real rocks here. They're not fake rocks. They're not made of plastic. This climbing thing, that's really high. That's five metres high. So how can we build playgrounds like this? Isn't everybody afraid of being sued or being blamed? No, because in England, those of us who were involved in playgrounds, and I was one of them, we realised that that super safe model was taking us in the wrong direction. It was a waste of money, it was not good for children, and frankly children were getting bored. So we came up with a new approach to playground safety and to thinking about risk. That's the report of that new approach. At the heart of the new approach was that instead of taking a tick box approach, you go around and say, oh, you cannot have this drop here because this drop is too high. You take a risk benefit approach. You think about the benefits that children get from having challenging and adventurous and exciting offers. That approach has led to a complete rethink about playground design in England in the UK, I should say. It's not the case everywhere, but we're seeing now some truly adventurous and rich and challenging public play spaces. Now I'm a member's person, so I like to think of members. So you'll maybe think, yes, but children do have accidents on playgrounds. I will tell you, playgrounds are not dangerous places. This chart shows you how likely you are to end up in hospital. So if you really want your child to end up in hospital from the different activity, you should get them to play rugby. Do you know rugby? Yes. Or football, soccer. If you're looking for playgrounds on that list, there you are. Playgrounds are a little bit more dangerous than fishing and a little bit less dangerous than sailing. Playgrounds are not dangerous places for children. So why does this matter? Here's a beautiful quote that I will share with you from a Danish landscape architect who's a genius. She says, I'm convinced that standardised playgrounds are dangerous in another way. When the distance between the ladders is exactly the same, the child has no need to think about where he puts his feet. This lesson cannot be carried over to the knobbly and asymmetrical forms of life. Yes, if we want to help children be ready for an uncertain but exciting life, we need to give them knobbly and asymmetrical forms. Yes, sometimes that means children might get hurt. But children do get hurt. It's part of childhood to fall over. Rub your knees and get up again. Here's another nice quote. This is a Canadian landscape architect. He talks about we need to distinguish between a learning injury and a catastrophic injury. I hope you can see that. In case you're thinking about the science behind this, the studies, we have some studies that show that what's sometimes called risky play, play where children want to take risks. They run fast, they climb, they hide. That kind of play, actually the benefits outweigh the risks. So Mariana Brisoni, who's a really smart researcher from Vancouver, gathered together with her colleagues, all the studies, on the injuries that happen when children play and also the benefits, the physical activity benefits, the learning benefits and showed that the benefits outweigh the risks. She's an injury prevention academic. She spends her life figuring out how to reduce injuries and she is a champion of risky play. She says, we've become increasingly concerned that some of our efforts to keep children safe might be doing unintended harm. This must give us pause for thought. So, Burner Van Lea Foundation commissioned me. I've been working, looking at risk for many years to write a white paper, a report, which is called Playing It Safe. The message I'm sharing with you and the message I tell whenever I speak around the world on this topic is this. We need a more thoughtful, balanced, holistic approach that play safety needs to take proper account of the benefits of risky, challenging play experiences. I hope you can see that from your own lives and your own experiences. So I'm going to share with you now one of those final quotes that you see from the internet or Facebook. Yes, this quote, great things never come from comfort zones. I hope you can see that's true of children, but I think it's also true of you and of me and of all of us, as parents, as teachers, as playground designers, as architects. We need to get outside of our comfort zones if we want to do great things for ourselves and for our children. Thank you very much.