Why Play Matters to Me, to the World, to the Future

By Martin Allen Morales, CEO Institute of Imagination

Let’s choose a future where every child, in every part of England, and the world, has everything to play for. 

Today, as CEO of the Institute of Imagination (iOi), and as a Commissioner on the Raising The National Play Commission, I see just how urgently England needs to reclaim play as a human right. Our new report, Everything to Play For, is unequivocal: play is not a luxury. It is how children learn, connect, and recover. It is foundational to wellbeing, development, and equality. 

And yet, as the report outlines, play is under threat; from shrinking school breaks to unsafe streets, from risk-averse planning to digital overdependence. The impact is sharpest on the most marginalised children; those already facing poverty, with SEND, and those suffering racial injustice. 

We are at a turning point. One in five children in England now struggles with mental health problems. Obesity rates are soaring. Fewer children are ‘school-ready’ than ever. And what’s been quietly squeezed out of their lives? Time, space, and permission to play. 

At the iOi, we create playful learning experiences that stretch across art, science, and technology. We see how play transforms children; how it unlocks problem-solving, agency, and joy. But this work shouldn’t be the exception. It must become the norm. That’s why I’m proud to be part of a Commission calling for a new National Play Strategy, with real investment, policy reform, and cultural change. 

For me, this is more than a professional mission. It is deeply personal. I know what it feels like to be a child on the outside of joy. I know what it means to use imagination as survival. And I know, from a lifetime of lived experience, that when children are given the freedom to play, they are also given the power to become something hopefully extraordinary. 

My first memory of play is sitting on the dusty floor of my grandmother’s kitchen in the Andes of Peru, surrounded by aunts, cousins, and the smell of corn boiling on the stove. We weren’t playing with toys. We were playing with food, ingredients, and stuff that was in the kitchen. They were telling stories, singing, having clapping games, playing chase, and having fun. That early experience of intergenerational, communal play embedded something in me: a sense of belonging, imagination, and emotional resilience that has grounded me since. 

But not all childhoods are playful. As I grew up, I saw the contrast all around me. In the same city I grew up in, Lima, Peru, I watched children who never had time or space to play. Poverty, violence, and the daily grind of survival pushed play away from them. I saw, firsthand, how the absence of play was not a minor loss; it was a stripping away of hope, creativity, and identity. 

When I migrated to the UK, I brought both the joy and the pain of those early experiences with me. I also carried the scars of systemic racism, of being ‘othered’ in spaces not built for my voice. Through all of it, play became not just a comfort, but a tool. I used it to process trauma, to connect across language barriers, to innovate in moments of need to build resilience. Play gave me strength when the world felt hostile. 

Now it’s time to turn that strength into action. 

Let’s build a future where play is protected, prioritised, and possible for every child, regardless of their postcode, their background, or their barriers. If we give children the opportunities and spaces to play, we’re not just giving them joy, we’re giving them justice, possibility, and power. 

Join us. Read the report here.