It’s influential worldwide

Press, 18 May 1989, Page 10

It’s influential worldwide

Playcentre's pioneering work

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by

MAVIS AIREY

The New Zealand Playcentre movement has been-a world pioneer in the field.

It had its roots in a nursery school opened in Feilding by Gwen Somerset in 1938. She had been approached by mothers about problems they had with their children. She believed that if these mothers were given an understanding of normal child development, the behaviour of their children would be explained. The distinctive feature of the school was the condition of admission that the child’s mother had to undertake some form of child study. This philosophy of parents and children learning together was to become a foundation for the Nursery Play Centre movement (later to become the New Zealand Playcentre ' Federation). When it was founded in 1948, Gwen Somerset was elected the movement’s first national president. The New Zealand Playcentre movement has been influential in Britain, India, West Germany, Canada, North America and Australia, says Lex Gray.

He has now had three children and seven grandchildren pass through playcentres, and was active in the early years of the movement in Wellington. “I’d come back from a war. I was angry at the loss of four years, and I wasn’t prepared to accept

second best for my children,” he says. He and his wife, Doris, found out about a playcentre in Kilbirnie. The Kilbirnie group had negotiated the use of a church hall; the parents raised money for equipment, and built it at working bees. At first a middle-aged woman acted as a supervisor, although the parents stayed with their children at the centre. But differences of approach between parents and teacher became evident, and eventually the parents took over the running of the centre.

“We discovered you can do things, with parents there, that you can’t with teachers, like water play, and getting messy. “We developed programmes so parents could use their own resources. Some people are good at music, or carpentry, or a family life and extended them in Playcentre.

“We were interested in natural things, so we did a lot of nature study, and the kids would paint what they’d seen when they came back. Instead of sandpits, we used the local beach.” Other centres developed differently, to suit individual needs.

“This is true of many centres today — there’s a freedom and flexibility about them,” he says. “People can make a niche for themselves.” An adult education tutor at Victoria University, he soon began to lecture to the playcentre parents. When he moved to Auckland Teachers College in 1952 he became president of the Auckland Playcentre Association and supervisor for training in the area. “The movement had mushroomed phenomenally,” he remembers. By the time he arrived in Auckland there were 18

centres in the city, but because it was a new movement they did not have their principles established, so Doris and he took responsibility for working up the constitution and principles.

When the Maori Education Foundation was set up with government funding, he became their preschool officer. In 1963, the foundation’s first centres were opened. “They were like playcentres, but developed a character of their own — which was good: that’s what playcentre does, it reflects its community.” After five years, he accepted a job with the adult education department of Sydney University, doing similar work with Aboriginal people. “As a new boy in Australia, and white, I knew there was no way I could get things done quickly, so I worked with the Maori elders in New Zealand to arrange for the people I had trained, to work with the Aboriginal people.

“I think it was the first inter-cultural programme there has been between

Maoris and Aborigines," he says. The Aboriginals called their groups Family Education Centres, and their success led to the development of the Playgroup movement in Australia, 30 years after it had started in New Zealand, he says. Now retired, he has decided to return to New Zealand, and has been making a tour of playcentres around the country.

With the new “Before Five” programme, he wants Playcentre to enter .the research field. The movement has been going long enough to do worthwhile research on its impact on society, he feels.

“It has been too influential in all parts of the world to be any longer left as just a bunch of mums. I still find it sad in New Zealand that if women do something they have to work twice as hard as if a man does it. I’m satisfied that the New Zealand standard matches up favourably with anything else I’ve seen in the world.”