Should We Have Tuff Trays in Early Years? By Dr. Alistair Bryce-Clegg

Let's Talk Tuff About Getting The Most From Our Tuff Trays!

Why Tuff Tray Activities Often Just Don’t Work!

By Dr Alistair Bryce-Clegg

I want to talk about something I see happening in settings all the time, and it’s usually done with the very best intentions. You’ve got your continuous provision set up, and to make sure children are ‘learning’ through it, you pop in an activity with a learning outcome. Usually in a tuff tray. Sometimes it’s counting treasure, sometimes it’s forming letters in glitter, sometimes it’s posting pictures that begin with the ‘s’ sound into a slot. All designed to cover an objective you’ve got to tick off.

But here’s the thing - if the activity has a learning outcome already attached to it, then it’s not play.

Don’t get me wrong, play can lead to learning. In fact, play is one of the most powerful ways that young children learn. But the second we, as adults, attach a predefined outcome to that play, we shift it. It becomes a task. And more often than not, it falls flat in the middle of your continuous provision.

The Great Tuff Tray Trap

Let’s take tuff trays, because they seem to be the default location for these sorts of outcome-led activities. I think a lot of that comes from a really understandable place, we’re all under pressure to show ‘coverage’ and evidence of learning. So, we plan a little tuff tray activity to cover that week’s phonics target or maths skill. We think, “If I put it in the tray, they’ll play with it—and that means they’ll learn it.”

But children aren’t daft. They know when something is play and when something is actually just a worksheet in disguise. And more often than not, they’ll either completely ignore your beautifully planned tray or they’ll subvert it and use it for something completely different.

I remember walking into a setting once where the practitioner had set up a seaside-themed tray to support the ‘understanding the world’. She’d added some shells with tricky words stuck on them and a little prompt that said, “Can you read the shell and then bury it in the sand?” But the children weren’t reading the shells. They were building a crab hotel. The tricky words were being used to build the walls. Not a single child “read and buried” as planned. And I just thought, this is play. But it’s their play, not ours.

And actually, it’s the child-led part that’s where all the juicy learning happens.

Why ‘Outcomes’ and Play Don’t Mix

When you attach an adult-determined outcome to a play experience, what you’re actually doing is reducing the potential for real exploration. It becomes narrow. Closed. And worse still, it can actually put children off engaging with that part of the provision altogether. 

Now, if a child is already deeply into something and you join in their play and offer an idea that links to a learning need, then brilliant! That’s what good continuous provision is all about. But that’s you responding to their play—not you dictating the direction of it before it even begins.

Tina Bruce talks about the importance of children being in control of their play, and that when adults step in too soon or try to lead it too heavily, we interrupt the process. And that’s what these outcome-led tray tasks do. They interrupt the play.

And let’s be honest, we’ve all done it. I’ve done it. I’ve planned the ‘maths in the tuff tray’ activity and waited hopefully for the children to come over and ‘do’ it. And when they didn’t, I either hovered around trying to encourage them (“Oooh, how many shells can you find?”) or gave up and decided to do it with a small group, so at least I could say I’d covered the objective.

Play Has to Be Free

Here’s the thing: play, in its truest form, has to be free. It has to belong to the child. And when it’s done properly, it covers more learning than any pre-planned objective ever could.

The EYFS talks about ‘planned, purposeful play’ and sometimes that gets misinterpreted as ‘planning play with objectives.’ But actually, the ‘planned’ bit is your environment. It’s the materials you choose, the provocations you set up, the time you give children, and the quality of the interactions you have when you join in.

So rather than planning outcomes for the tuff tray, think about what you want the tray to invite. Curiosity? Exploration? Collaboration? That’s what continuous provision is for. It’s the canvas for the child’s thinking. You’re the artist who jumps in when needed, not the one who paints the picture and asks the child to colour it in.

Let the Tray Be the Tray

Tuff trays are brilliant. I’m not knocking them at all. They’re perfect for creating invitations to explore. But let’s keep them playful. Let them be places where children test out ideas and change the rules halfway through. Let them be theirs.

If you’ve got something you want to cover, great. Plan to engage with a few key children that week and bring your learning objective into their play. Don’t force all children to come to your play.

The second a tuff tray becomes a task tray, it stops being play.

So next time you’re tempted to add an ‘I can…’ or ‘I wonder…’ statement to your tray or sneak a learning outcome into a pile of lentils, pause. Ask yourself - is this activity something a child would choose to do? Does it allow them to follow their own interests? Or am I dressing up a mini-lesson as play?

If it’s got a fixed outcome, it’s not play. And if it’s not play, it doesn’t belong in continuous provision.

Alistair.