Foundational Play™ is rooted in a simple but powerful truth: Play is the most optimised form of learning available to any child, anywhere in the world.
Shweta Chari, our co-founder & CEO, witnessed this at a Mumbai shelter home in 2004. Children who had stopped speaking raised their hands. Children who had shut down emotionally, opened up. In Play, they reclaimed agency, self-expression, independent thinking — everything their circumstances had stripped away. That moment became The Opentree Foundation.
21 years later, this truth guides TOF's work in government schools in India, where children from unstable homes sit in multi-grade classrooms, engaging in rote-based instruction disguised as learning. Children cannot build curiosity, self-regulation, or resilience in such environments. These capacities: the very architecture of learning, require spaces where children explore, fail safely, and try again.
This is not only India's story. The World Bank estimates 70% of children in low and middle-income countries cannot read by age 10, not because they aren't in school, but because classrooms aren't built for learning. India's NEP 2020 mandates play-based learning for all children ages 3–11. But the systemic pathways to implement this are missing: teacher capacity building, ensured access to Play materials, mandated Play time in school.
The policy is right. The model to deliver it did not yet exist. Neither did the field to sustain it.
TOF has been building both.
Foundational Play™ reimagines what school is for: not the delivery of content to be recalled, but the development of whole humans — curious, collaborative, emotionally aware, and confident in their ability to think, question, and grow.
Across our 900+ schools, this shift is visible every day. Children lead learning: they collaborate, ask questions without fear, test ideas, and discover something new each time they play. They learn to negotiate, resolve conflict, and be adaptable and agile. Teachers, trained as Play Practitioners, use play intentionally to improve engagement, strengthen social-emotional learning, and respond to everyday classroom needs. Schools initiate play spaces with communities.
Independent evaluations show 1.68x growth in Critical thinking, 1.43x growth in Communication skills, with 44% students applying life skills in everyday learning, all within a year.
The model works through five integrated levers:
• Playtime: protected daily play embedded into the school timetable
• Play Materials: replayable, contextually relevant learning kits
• Playful Spaces: environments that invite exploration and safe risk-taking
• Playful Schooling: teacher capacity-building and school-level systems that sustain play
• Playful Parenting: family engagement that protects play beyond school
This model scales through government partnerships deliberately designed to taper TOF's direct support as system ownership grows.
From an initiative with one group of children in 2004, our work has evolved into the Foundational Play™ model reaching approximately 200,000 children annually — 99% growth in the last three years, across 900+ government schools in 12 Maharashtra districts, with 1 million+ children impacted since inception. But the real measure of spread is not just how many schools, but how many systems are choosing to own play
Maharashtra's Chief Minister formally endorsed our programme to 4 district offices. The district government of Ahilyanagar became the first to approve district-wide institutionalisation of play-based pedagogy — a government system adopting what began as a civil society initiative. The State Education Department, responsible for 60,000+ government schools, is in active discussion to embed play into state teacher training.
Alongside implementation, TOF is building the field infrastructure needed to mainstream play:
A. Evidence: State of Play Study (2025) — 605 respondents across 6 districts, creating India’s first quantified baseline on the play gap
B. Open Resource: Playpedia.in — a free, open-source play repository for educators globally
C. Ecosystem Building: Play Summit — convening 600+ educators, policymakers, and researchers over two years to drive collective action
D. Policy Advocacy: National Roundtable (March 2026) — convening alongside the LEGO Group, NITI Aayog, and the Department of Women and Child Development to advance systems readiness for scale
Since our last HundrED entry, three additions: the School Readiness Play Programme, working with anganwadis before formal school begins; the Playful Schools pilot, which became the direct basis of the Foundational Play Programme model; and India's first open-access, quantified study of the play gap.
Anganwadis — India's 1.4 million government-run early childhood centres, the first point of structured care for most children from low-income families are mandated by NEP 2020 to deliver foundational learning. In practice, most function as day care. Our School Readiness Play Programme works inside this system to build the self-regulation, curiosity, and social behaviours that make Grade 1 learning possible.
The Playful Schools pilot taught us that a transformed teacher inside an unchanged school eventually reverts. Shifting from training practitioners to reshaping whole institutions — leadership, timetables, spaces, community norms is what made change hold. That learning became the architecture of the Foundational Play Programme.
The State of Play Study matters because without shared evidence, the case for play stays anecdotal. Policymakers fund what is measured. Without a credible baseline, advocates argue past each other, funders cannot compare impact, and the field cannot move together. We are releasing it publicly, ahead of International Day of Play, June 2026, as evidence for the field of Play.
To implement Foundational Play™ in your school or system: begin with our situational analysis, formalise via MoU, and join a Power of Play workshop — the entry point into sustained practice change.
Visit Playpedia.in — free play-based resources for any educator, anywhere. No cost, no sign-up.
For government or NGO partnerships at scale: email play@opentree.org.
