"You're Allowed Play Too"

Early Years, Lasting Impact: Practical approaches to building the foundations that shape every outcome

Partway through this conversation, Roisin Casey describes the advice she gives most often to the adults in her classroom — not the children. "You're allowed play too," she tells them. It's a small line, but it captures something bigger about this whole session: that the foundations laid in early years aren't really about worksheets or displays. They're about what happens when adults are willing to sit down, watch, and play alongside the child in front of them.

What this conversation is really about

Three early years leaders join this session, each having arrived at the field from a slightly different direction. Caz Jude spent 17 years as a head teacher across the UK and internationally before becoming a leadership coach and director of Early Years International Solutions — and she's the one who names what's easy to lose sight of: that the independence and confidence built in early years is meant to carry a child through their whole life, not just their first few classrooms. Roisin Casey, an early years educator at Powered by Play in Dubai, brings a practitioner's eye for the small, deliberate choices — from multilingual co-teaching to letting children redesign the classroom itself — that quietly do the heaviest lifting. And Marwa Nsouli, Head of Early Years and Primary at the International School of London, Qatar, brings a Reggio-inspired lens on relationships, belonging and agency, and on what it actually takes to keep a learning space child-led rather than just child-decorated.

Hosted by Dr Helen Wright, the conversation moves through the things that look simple on the surface of an early years classroom — a "reporter and photographer" role, a construction zone that spills into the corridor, an empty home corner — and pulls apart just how much intentional thinking sits underneath each one.

Inside the full recording, session gets into the practical detail that makes this genuinely useful for anyone leading or teaching in early years. Roisin walks through how her team uses a "toolkit" for communication in a multilingual classroom, and how they borrowed a "pedagogy of play" framework from Harvard's Project Zero to understand their own play styles as adults, not just the children's. Marwa unpacks what it really takes to keep a learning environment child-centred rather than adult-led, and how her team brings parents directly into the process of reviewing classroom documentation. And Caz shares a strikingly simple technique — giving children the roles of "photographer" and "reporter" during play — that builds observational skill, vocabulary and independence, almost without the children noticing they're learning at all.

And if you'd rather start with the headlines, the accompanying takeaways resource pulls out the panel's sharpest practical ideas — from the questions worth asking before you set up a classroom space, to the three foundations of early years that rarely get taught in formal training.

Both the full recording and the key takeaways resource are available below — just pop in your details to access them.

Early Years, Lasting Impact is part of the Outstanding Schools webinar series. Featuring Caz Jude (Early Years International Solutions), Roisin Casey (Powered by Play, Dubai) and Marwa Nsouli (International School of London, Qatar), hosted by Dr Helen Wright.