Some partnerships feel strategic. This one feels personal.
This new relationship between Fondazione Reggio Children and the International Playoneering®️ Studio isn’t something that has appeared out of nowhere. It’s been forming for years, quietly, through visits, conversations, questions, and a steady reshaping of how I understand education and my role within it.
This week, I’m travelling back to Reggio Emilia to meet with Professor Francesco Profumo, President of Fondazione Reggio Children, as we formally launch the first official partnership between Fondazione Reggio Children and a UK education organisation. To be returning at this particular moment feels especially meaningful. As international attention turns towards Reggio Emilia during The Princess of Wales’s visit this week, there is a growing global conversation emerging around early childhood, relationships, wellbeing and the future of education. To be part of that conversation, and to contribute a UK perspective through this partnership, feels incredibly significant.
Reggio Emilia has shaped me far beyond my professional life. It has influenced how I think as a human being, as a parent, as a friend, and as someone who cares deeply about the kind of world we are building with and for children. Those early visits to the Loris Malaguzzi International Centre and Remida didn’t give me a framework to follow. They did something more important than that. They shifted my values. They helped me see learning as something relational, something alive, something that cannot be reduced to outcomes alone.
Over time, that way of seeing has been strengthened through other influences, particularly the work of Guy Claxton and the Learning Power Approach, and through the growing understanding of what neuroscience is telling us about how children actually learn and develop.
And when you sit with all of that long enough, a pattern starts to emerge. The future of education cannot be built on compliance. It has to be built on thinking. Not thinking as in getting the right answer, but thinking as in forming ideas, testing them, reshaping them, and doing that in relationship with others. The kind of thinking that happens when children are given time, space and trust to explore the world, not rush through it. Because that’s what the science keeps pointing us back to. Children build their brains through experience. Through play. Through dialogue. Through sustained shared thinking. Through the natural undulations of trying something, changing their mind, coming back to it, seeing it differently. And yet so many systems still pull in the opposite direction. Towards speed. Towards certainty. Towards answers over process.
But the world children are growing into isn’t asking for better answers.
It’s asking for people who can create new ones.
That requires something different from us.
It requires us to take children’s ideas seriously. To stay with them. To relaunch them. To build curriculum from them rather than delivering it to them. Playoneering®️ teaches the professional moves that turn play, enquiry and oracy into rigorous learning at scale.
It requires us to help children understand not just what to think, but what it feels like to have an idea and act on it. Because that feeling is where agency begins.
And that’s really what sits at the heart of this partnership.
Over the past 16 years, across our nurseries and schools, we have been working to build environments where this kind of learning can happen. Where children are not managed through learning, but are actively engaged in shaping it. Where thinking is visible, shared and evolving.
To now step into a formal partnership with Fondazione Reggio Children feels like an alignment of values that have been running alongside each other for a long time.
Not to replicate what has been done before. But to continue the conversation. To explore what the legacy of Reggio Emilia looks like in a world that is more complex, more uncertain and more in need of new thinking than ever.
This is about bringing together practice, research and lived experience. About asking better questions.
About staying open enough to keep evolving. And about doing that together.
I’m genuinely excited about what comes next, not because I think we have the answers, but because I know we’re asking the right kinds of questions.
And that feels like the most important place to begin.
