The Serious Matter of Play: Reflections from UNICEF UK’s All Staff Meeting

With thanks to colleagues from the UNICEF UK Disability Network for hosting Alex & for feedback on this post.

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Earlier this week, I had the privilege of attending UNICEF UK’s annual All-Staff Meeting, and it was truly inspiring. While there are many highlights I’ll share over the coming weeks, today I want to reflect on the insights sparked by our newest celebrity High Profile Supporter, Alex Brooker. His session, wonderfully hosted by our Disability Network, was a powerful reminder of the role we all play in advancing inclusion.

Alex has been involved with UNICEF for some time, notably through Soccer Aid, where he became the first person living with disabilities to play for the England XI. He spoke to us with honesty, humour, and heart about inclusion, children’s rights, and overcoming shame and stigma.

One particularly powerful moment was thanks to Alex’s visit to the Za’atari refugee camp, where he saw a UNICEF-supported inclusive playground. You can watch the video here, and this quote from Alex captures its significance beautifully:

This is the first playground of its type in any refugee camp in the world… there’s a seesaw where you can get a wheelchair on… there’s a swing for people who can’t hold on as well… the way it's all colour-coded... they've thought of everything. Children just want to play and to actually be included. I can't say strongly enough, as someone who's experienced this as a kid, how big a thing that is.”

Many of us were especially moved when Alex met Elan, a child born with four missing fingers. Fitted with a new prosthetic hand —designed and developed through a 3D printing initiative run by refugee innovators—Elan spoke with joy about her new hand and her determination to combat the stigmas she faced.

While Alex's journey demonstrates the importance of UNICEF’s efforts, he also highlighted a stark reality: children with disabilities remain among the most marginalised in the world. They often face barriers to education, healthcare, and even the simple joy of play. A recent UNICEF-supported Lancet study found that children with disabilities have 9% fewer opportunities to play than their non-disabled peers. This exclusion hinders their social, emotional, and cognitive development.

This is why our commitment to creating inclusive environments and opportunities is more vital than ever.

Thankfully, there are signs of progress. UNICEF is pioneering new approaches to inclusion —even in heavily resource-constrained settings like Za'atari - and helping to create spaces where every child can thrive, ensuring that none are excluded from the joys and opportunities of childhood.

Working closely with children living with disabilities and their families, we are designing and implementing everything from accessible playgrounds, new assistive technologies and inclusive classrooms to community-based programs, inclusive social protection programmes and national policy frameworks. These innovative interventions are based on partnerships with communities, local authorities, NGOs, governments. Our work in this area is starting to change hearts, minds and actions.

In addition, we are helping to understand the scale of the problem. Our collaboration with the Washington Group on Disability Statistics is a ground-breaking data innovation. By identifying children most at risk of exclusion from their rights, and ensuring relevant questions are built into national household surveys, we’ve co-produced the first internationally comparable data set on child disability in low- and middle-income countries. This data - which has been approved for use in SDG progress reports - allows us to systematically track and advocate for inclusion as a global systems-change issue.

It is by being both creative and rigorous in how we advance inclusion that we can ensure that every child’s right to play is protected and upheld. As Alex reminded us, this really is the serious matter of play.?Together, we can continue to build a future where no child is left out or behind. Learn more about how we’re making inclusion a reality — and how you can be a part of it.

Further reading and watching:

See more on the Za'atari playground here

Find our about the Paralympics Equal Play campaign here