The right of the child to play in the national reports submitted to the Committee on the Rights of the Child

ABSTRACT

The right of the child to play is recognised in Art. 31.1 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). The 2013 approval of General Comment No. 17, in which the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) entreats the signatory states to raise attention to child play.

This study analyses, through the reports submitted by the members of the European Union in the CRC, the relevance of child play. Also, the study analyses the final recommendations by the CRC to each state.

Even though all child play policies are not reflected in these documents and there is a word limit for reports, the results of the analysis are not positive, showing that the states do not exhaustively comply with the reports’ guidelines. Furthermore, they appear to demonstrate that General Comment No. 17 did not have the desired impact in the reported child play policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood
• children’s right
• right to play
• Convention on the Rights of the Child

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Jaume Bantulà Janot Phd. Of Philosophy and Educational Sciences from the University of Barcelona. Professor of the Theory and Practice of the different manifestations of the play in Ramon Llull University (Barcelona, Spain). Bachelor of Geography and History. Catalan teacher and Physical Education teacher. Postgraduate in Physical Education. Director of the degree studies in Activity Sciences Physics and Sports at the Faculty of Psychology, Education and Sport Sciences (Ramon Llull University) from 2008 to the present. Research stays and visiting professorships at Universidad Santiago de Chile and Universidad Talca (Chile). He has many academic publications on the topics of play and physical activity and sports science.

Andrés Payà Rico Associated Professor of Theory and History of Education, and Head of Department of Comparative Education and History of Education at the University of Valencia (2014–2019). Course Director of the Master's in Psychopedagogy at the University of Valencia (2019-present); Consultant Professor at the Open University of Catalonia. Member of Academic Board for the PhD Programme Pedagogical Sciences at the University of Bologna (Italy). Research stays and visiting professorships at: University of Macerata (Italy), University of Gent (Belgium), Autonomous University of the State of Morelos (Mexico), Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja (Ecuador). He has some 100 academic publications (10 books, 50 book chapters and 40 articles), on the topics of play, history of education, educational policy and comparative education. He has co-editor of the journal ‘Espacio, Tiempo y Educación. ETE’ (Scopus).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the State Program for Development of Scientific Research and Techniques for Excellence, State Subprogram for Generation of Knowledge, in the framework of the State Plan for Scientific Research and Innovation of the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Government of Spain) under Grant number EDU 2014-52267P.