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Children at Cambrai work hard - and because of this, we are committed to offering the opportunity to play hard! Our work with OPAL is leading us to developing high quality, varied and exciting playtimes! Our Gold Award reflects the offer that children at Cambrai get for their playtimes. We're told by OPAL that this puts our school in the top 5% of the country for playtime experiences!

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OPAL is an award-winning, mentor supported school improvement programme that addresses all the areas that schools must plan for if they want to strategically and sustainably improve the quality of their play opportunities. OPAL is the only programme of its kind that has been independently proven to sustainably improve the quality of play in British primary schools.

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From a first glance at our school, you can see that we are an OPAL school... Not only do our children have big smiles, but our lovely site is enhanced with a wonderful selection of play areas and opportunities in order to allow our children to develop their play behaviors, follow their interests and live our school virtues outside of the classroom. 

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The key areas of our school site which have been developed with OPAL principles in mind are: 

• a class sized sand pit 

• a class sized gravel pit 

• a large mud kitchen and small digging area 

• a fire pit area for large group chats!

• a large digging area

• quieter seating areas around the school site

• a huge fixed play high challenge area 

• 'The Village' - wooden shelter area 

• a loose parts zone... to flare budding designers' imaginations 

• quiet activity areas - for colouring and lego activities  

• a MUGA for ball games 

• a 'wheels' zone

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In the pipeline are the additional areas of...

• a dressing up, music and performance zone

• a tree hanging zone!

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Grown ups - we are always looking for additional resources for our OPAL playtimes! Please send in to school any old pans, pots, gardening tools (no garden forks), dressing up items, tyres, planks, crates, tarpaulins.... if a child could play with it - we'll take it!

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To download our full play policy, please click here!

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             For more information about the OPA Programme, visit
             https://outdoorplayandlearning.org.uk