Case study | Creating playful experiences for under-fives

In 2023, The Royal Academy of Arts set up Early Years Studio, a new learning programme for under-fives and their caregivers. Our pilot year ran from autumn 2023 to summer 2024, with monthly sessions taking place on weekdays during term time.

Designed by artist Amy Leung and informed by educational approaches and thinkers such as Reggio Emilia and Maria Montessori, sessions have been inspired by themes including nature, pattern, light and movement.

Each month, our youngest visitors can investigate a curated studio environment at their own pace. The response has been positive, with participants describing sessions as accessible, relaxing, peaceful, creative and non-intrusive.

Promoting independence

Children are encouraged to explore independently with no set rules about what they are meant to create, and the sessions have allowed adults to take a break.

Refraining from setting a structure while enabling open-ended exploration has allowed each child to get what they want from the session – and put us in the best position to meet individual needs, regardless of developmental stage, age or interest.

But it’s vital to consider the environment’s layout, grouping materials together at workstations and protecting a cushioned area for pre-walkers. We have ensured everything is easily accessible and set at the child’s height, while limiting the use of tables and chairs.

This promotes independence, encouraging children to move freely within the space, making novel and unexpected connections.

As a team, we understand the value of play within early childhood development, but we have discovered that adults learn from this approach too. When the only expectation placed on them is to let the child take the lead, they have greater capacity to witness and appreciate the uniqueness of each child within their current life stage.

Format and ticketing

We know that offering a broad and flexible time window is necessary to accommodate evolving family sleep schedules, which are particularly varied within under-fives. One change we have made is to schedule short breaks throughout the day for resetting the studio space. This has been particularly important when using wet materials or those that are quickly exhausted.

An ongoing tension between demand and capacity restrictions has led us to explore practical solutions that ensure our offer remains open and accessible. Having tested several ticketing formats, we now intend to extend our opening hours and provide additional activities for queuing families. We hope this enables us to limit use of a booking system, which represents a barrier for many families with young children.

Staff training

How best to support creative play is a question that has led us to seek guidance from an external training provider. Subsequently, we have found that maintaining a broad understanding of play and its benefits, alongside a consistent delivery team, has been key to developing staff confidence.

However, there is still more work to be done. Particularly for our newest staff members, there remains some uncertainty around what exactly their role entails. We recognise that being highly attuned to how children are engaging with the studio environment is fundamental. In light of this, we have added an observation exercise to the list of staff responsibilities, which will be used to inform discussions at our post-session debrief.

We look forward to deepening our knowledge of this audience across the next phase of workshops – insight that will, no doubt, continue to inform and shape the programme.

Lily McGuire is the family and community programmes manager at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Thank you to Lucy Stiles who supported the pilot as part of her maternity cover position