Helpful kit

If you’re planning to hold playing out sessions regularly, you’ll need some basic kit to make it safe and legal.

Road closure signs and barriers

In order to close your street safely and legally, check with your local council what they require you to use in the way of formal signage, cones or other barriers. Some councils supply these to streets for free, which is great.

In Bristol, we use flexible ‘road closed’ signs which fit over traffic cones, but you can also use signs tied onto wheelie bins, like in this photo –>

Lots of companies sell these online, or they can be ordered from our street play kit provider Brightwayz.

See more info here on how to borrow play street kit in Bristol.

Street play kit

As long as you’ve closed the road safely, you really don’t need to spend money on anything else! But if you do have funding, you can buy our ready-made street play kits, with extra bits to go along with the formal road closure signs that are a legal requirement. Ideally you would get your council to buy a batch or find a local funding pot to pay for them.

Kit contents

The Playing Out kit comes in a strong cotton bag and includes:

• Playing Out organiser pack including manual, forms, covid safety notes, guidance for stewards.
• Large wheelie-bin stickers x 4
• Lanyards with whistles and laminated steward briefings x 2
• ‘Playing Out’ logo hi-viz vests x 4
• Posters x 10
• Leaflets x 100
• Long skipping rope x 1
• Elastic for french skipping
• Street chalk

We have partnered with the active travel social enterprise Brightkidz to sell play street kits and related signage. Visit the shop. You may also be able to get some of these items more cheaply online, or locally to you.

Road open for play signs

You can also order a lovely Road Open For Play sign – please note these are to be used in addition to the official Road Closed signs, not instead of them!

Making sure your closures are safe and legal

Each local authority will have different requirements for the signs that you use to close your road, some may want you to use a certain type of sign, some will be more flexible. You can email them to find out if they have specific requirements.

If in doubt, you might want to opt for the rigid cone mounted signs as they tend to be favoured by more risk averse councils, who don’t always like the use of wheelie bins on the highway or banner signs which might be perceived as less official looking (although they do confirm to legal standards re: size and reflectivity).

For support with stewarding, you can watch our ‘How to Steward a School Street or Play Street‘ video, which will talk you through how to safely and legally manage your road closure.

To find out more about organising playing out sessions see Playing Out in Four Simple Steps, or to read the experiences of other people opening their streets for play see our parent and resident stories. There are also lots of other ways you can support children to play out more.