Children using Boromi Play Libraries show notable gains in language and communication skills

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My son never maintains focus on anything. Last night he played with his Boromi bag for over 20 minutes and even let his brother play with him!

Parent

Last year, young children who used Boromi Play Libraries showed notable gains in language and communication skills, enhanced social and emotional development, and positive behaviour changes at both school and home.

According to teachers’ surveys, participating children’s communication, language, and speaking skills improved by 19.3 percentage points in 2023-24.

The hands-on and physical nature of the Play Libraries provided by Boromi particularly contributed to children’s development in oracy and language skills, evaluator ImpactEd reported.

Other impact highlights included:

  • A 10.7 percentage point increase in children’s social and emotional development.
  • Parent surveys showed a 10.3 percentage-point increase in parents’ confidence, knowledge and ideas to initiate play-based activities with their child.
  • There was a noticeable change in average scores for the quality of learning activities that parents perform with preschool children from 2023-24 which could be partly attributed to Boromi’s influence.
  • Teachers noted improved communication abilities in quieter children after having engaged with Boromi.
  • Children showed an improvement in their behaviour at both school and at home, with a 10.6 percentage-point increase across the two years.
  • Boromi bags were associated with increased imagination and ability to engage in independent play.

Working in partnership with educational and community settings, Boromi is building a national ‘Network of Play’, nurturing and advocating for early language and development by introducing hands-on, language-rich, and shared family play into the everyday spaces families frequent.

Play Libraries hosted within primary schools provide free play bags for 3-5-year-olds each term for families to borrow, take home and explore together.

The play bags are built around Boromi’s four play principles (‘investigate’, ‘invent’, ‘imagine’ and ‘share’) and provide families with easy-to-follow visual guidance and resources to spark and inspire child-led, language rich family play. Importantly, every play bag also models how shared activities can be repeated at home using everyday household objects and materials.

Boromi’s latest impact report draws upon quantitative and qualitative work carried out by Boromi and ImpactEd Evaluation as well as previous years’ impact evaluations.

The programme’s impact on outcomes was measured using before-and-after surveys for teachers and parents, along with feedback from parents, teachers, and children.

In their end-of-term surveys, parents left comments about the impact of the play bags.

One said: “My son never maintains focus on anything. Last night he played with his Boromi bag for over 20 minutes and even let his brother play with him!”

Another said: “He’ll just start getting stuff out randomly and then just decide to cook by himself or decide that something needs fixing. We’ve had to encourage that imagination in the past. It’s not so much the case anymore.”

SHINE has worked in partnership with Boromi since its creator Evie Keough won a Let Teachers SHINE award in 2019. Since then, we have supported the Play Libraries scheme through a series of grants.

Evaluations conducted by ImpactEd Evaluation since 2021 have found Boromi has led to consistent improvements across both children and parents’ skillsets and relationships to learning.

This year, SHINE has funded a further evolution of the Boromi model. Thanks to a grant of almost £250,000, Boromi has been able to pilot and evaluate a community Play Libraries model that has been specifically designed for families with children from birth, with the flexibility to be able to work in partnership with a diverse array of community settings.

This community model is enabling Boromi to reach new families of children aged 0-5 years, expanding its reach beyond what was possible through its school-based programme alone.

Community pop-in Play Libraries have been piloted alongside the existing schools’ programme and within the local communities surrounding lead schools.

An evaluation of the first and second pilots of the community pop-in Play Libraries model between 2022-2024 has discovered that parents are finding the programme useful in supporting the early development of their babies and young children.

Impact highlights included:

  • 5% of parents surveyed agreed that the Play Library gave them ideas of things they could play again at home.
  • 100% of families would recommend visiting a Play Library to a friend.
  • 67% of surveyed families visited a community setting specifically to play with the Play Library.
  • 97% of families stayed longer in a community setting as a result of the Play Library.
  • Parents rated Play Libraries on average 8.2 out of 10 when asked ‘How valuable do you find having this Play Library in this setting?’

As part of the evaluation, parents were asked what they thought of the play libraries.

Kyla, a participating parent, said: “I found that it made all of us talk. My mum, my nan and the children. All of us got involved in it.”

I found the bags very helpful because it gave [me] different ideas that I could do with a newborn and also a preschooler. It just grew my imagination as an adult.

Nic Parent

Another parent, Nic, said: “I found the bags very helpful because it gave [me] different ideas that I could do with a newborn and also a preschooler. It just grew my imagination as an adult.”

A third said: “Trying to entertain a child in a coffee shop is hard work, but this grounded us. We must have been playing with them for about an hour.”

Another parent commented: “I do think it brought my family closer together.”

One of the libraries is located in The Owl Tree Children’s Café, in Newcastle. A member of the team said: “Parents are sitting down… for a bit longer; they’ve spent a little bit more time actually physically playing with their child. Sitting and concentrating with your child, that doesn’t necessarily happen at our setting very much.”

And Kippax Children’s Centre in Kippax, Leeds, said: “The learning element… to be able to take those play ideas, opportunities [and] build on those experiences at home with the children… it has just been an immense thing for our families.”

These community pop-in Play Libraries launched nationally for early adopters as of late summer 2024. Boromi intends to expand to new communities and locations over the next two years. Additionally, ongoing evaluations will continue to assess the impact of this community-based approach.

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