Realising the 'right to play' in the special school playground

In this paper I mobilise a multimodal ethnographic data fragment depicting a moment of play in a UK 'special school' playground to unpack the challenges of realising the 'right to play' (Article 31, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child) in a non-inclusive play space. I show that play (im)possibilities were delineated by the physical boundaries of the playground, the absence of non-disabled peers and a lack of symbol-based resources to support playful meaning-making. Nevertheless, the children execute a short play event through multimodal embodied communication encompassing pleasure, frustration, invitations, rejections, acceptances, and negotiations over resources. I argue that this brief play event instantiates broader debates around the 'right to play': specifically, to what extent this right can be realised in a non-inclusive playground, whether autistic children require play 'training', and how diverse forms of play can be scaffolded by staff in the absence of non-disabled children.