Kate's Blog

These are the things I know about imagination, trust, and the worlds people build when you stop correcting them, at eight or at eighty.

Thoughts and Evidence

Play Is How Children Make Sense of Their World

Play Is How Children Make Sense of Their Worldby: Kate

UNICEF confirms what children already know. Play is not a reward. It is how children build confidence, process emotions, and discover what they are capable of.

playUNICEFchildren's confidenceimaginationfamily connectionemotional development
Play Is How Children Make Sense of Their World

Give Them Back the Time

Give Them Back the Timeby: Kate

We tell children their voice matters. Then we fill every hour of their day with our agenda and wonder why they have nothing left to say.

unscheduled timechildren's voiceplayfamilyagendaself-leadershipStoryQuest
Give Them Back the Time

What Play Actually Does, and Why Its Absence Is a Wellbeing Crisis

What Play Actually Does, and Why Its Absence Is a Wellbeing Crisisby: Kate

Play is one of the first languages through which children tell their stories. We have been taking it away without asking what we are taking with it.

playwellbeing crisischildren's developmentstorytellingfamilyUNICEFself-leadership
What Play Actually Does, and Why Its Absence Is a Wellbeing Crisis

We Cut Play. Then We Wondered Why Children Struggled.

We Cut Play. Then We Wondered Why Children Struggled.by: Kate

Between 1995 and 2019 breaktime in UK primary schools was cut by 45 minutes every week. What was cut with it.

playbreaktimeUK primary schoolschildren strugglingplay crisisfamily connectionStoryQuest
We Cut Play. Then We Wondered Why Children Struggled.

BOOK KATE TO SPEAK

Build a world together, and trust follows.

Your people are being asked to trust each other across distance, across generations and through constant change. Most have never been shown how.

Kate Markland has. For a time she had one hour a week with her son Gabriel, on a FaceTime call. They spent it building a world. She asked one question, wrote down everything he said and corrected nothing. That world became three books and a method tested in nine UK schools.

In her keynote, Create the World You Want, Kate shows your audience how trust is really built, and gives them a method they can use the same evening.

For leadership, education and family audiences.

Even the kids who don’t like writing didn’t want to leave.
Tom Hirst Head of English, Dixons Manningham Primary
Even the kids who don’t like writing didn’t want to leave.
Tom Hirst Head of English, Dixons Manningham Primary

STORYQUEST

StoryQuest gives children the freedom to imagine, speak and be heard without being corrected, guided or rushed. It begins with a story. But what families create together is something much bigger: connection.

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