National Childrens Week Oration 2023

In celebration of Children's Week!

We know that children who get the chance to play out of doors grow up healthier and happier. Yet in Australia and around the world, the horizons of childhood are shrinking. Children are spending more and more time indoors and in front of screens. And adults are becoming ever more anxious about children’s safety and well-being. What is more, adult anxieties can end up harming children’s learning and development, fuelling unnecessary fears and undermining trust and confidence in ourselves and our children.

How can parents, educators, campaigners and decision makers build the case for outdoor play, and for a balanced, thoughtful approach to risk? Based on his influential books No Fear: Growing up in a risk averse society and Urban Playground: child-friendly planning and design can save cities, Tim Gill will make the case for expanding children’s horizons, starting in their own homes, schools, children’s services settings and neighbourhoods.

Tim’s presentation will be followed by a panel of Australian leaders and audience reflection and discussion on what action we need to take to create a case for play and where does play fit in the National Wellbeing Agenda?

The oration only will be live streamed across Australia from approximately 10.15 am till 11.30am

About Tim Gill

Tim is a global leader of the movement for a balanced, thoughtful approach to risk in childhood: a position set out in his 2007 book No Fear: Growing up in a risk averse society, published by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation He is one of the architects of risk benefit assessment (RBA), having had a leading role in its development in the UK over two decades. In 2021 he became Chair of the UK Play Safety Forum, a body whose work he has supported since the 1990s.

Tim is co-author of the government-funded publication Managing Risk in Play Provision: Implementation Guide. and the publication Risk Benefit Assessment for Outdoor Play: A Canadian Toolkit [pdf link]. The approach set out in these publications is supported by the UK’s overarching safety regulator, the Health and Safety ExecutiveTim is a longstanding advocate for child-friendly urban planning and design. His book Urban Playground: How child-friendly planning and design can save cities was published by the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2021. It was RIBA’s bestselling publication that year.

Tim is a Churchill Fellow, which allowed him to examine how the cities of Calgary, Ghent, Antwerp, Freiburg, Oslo, Rotterdam and Vancouver have taken children into account in their planning. Other cities including Recife, Tel Aviv and Tirana have also been included in Tim’s research, thanks to financial support from the Bernard van Leer Foundation through its Urban 95 initiative.

Tim is co-author of the first London-wide planning guidance on children’s play and recreation; the revised edition is helping to shape neighbourhoods for London’s children.

As well as playgrounds, his interest in the built environment embraces streets, neighbourhood planning, transport and public space, and children’s evolving relationship with nature. He explored this last topic in a 2011 report for former Mayor of London Boris Johnson’s Sustainable Development Commission entitled Sowing the Seeds: Reconnecting London’s children with nature [pdf link].

.