Children who don't get appropriate opportunities to play are often the adults we see in therapy," says educational consultant Alice Quinn. "Play teaches children things no one else can."

Quinn is the keynote speaker at this weekend's annual conference of the Irish Pre-school Playgroups Association. The theme of this year's Kilkenny gathering is "Cherishing Childhood", with emphasis on the vital role of play in early childhood. Looking around a few shops - from a local newsagent to larger department stores, and particularly some of the newer mega-toyshops - it would seem the value of play is well recognised. However, according to Quinn, there is an important distinction to be made between the sort of play children have with particular toys and the way they play when they are allowed a certain freedom to explore.

"Nowadays, all sorts of toys are marked `educational'," she says. "Parents almost feel guilty if they don't buy these particular toys, as if their children will be academically hindered in later life. "In fact, children learn more through the process of play than from a toy which reacts when they press a certain button. "Make-believe, for example, is essential for children. Pretending a stone is a castle is the basis for understanding print - something which represents something else. Similarly, when they are playing `mummys and daddys' children will create situations which put them into mummy or daddy's shoes. In this way they learn how other people feel in particular situations. "As we get more affluent, we are giving children more and more toys which do all sorts of things for them: computer games which don't ask them to envisage anything; dolls which say 10 particular things; plastic fruit to play cooking with. These toys actually inhibit children's imaginations. "If the doll didn't say something when you pressed her, think of the hundreds of things a child would pretend she was saying. "The ability to imagine is a very important thinking skill, useful in all sorts of situations, and children will naturally develop this skill if they have the opportunity to play imaginatively with toys - or one another."

According to Quinn, play is generally underrated - devalued in favour of more academic activities that seem to be more educational. "Part of our thinking in the late 20th century is that everything we do has to have an obvious and meaningful end. So we give children toys which we think have a clear purpose - they will learn that if they wind it up, it moves, for instance. "But while toys like this may assure us our children are learning, in fact they limit their scope for play, and for learning. They may keep quiet for a while, but that's not the same thing as being absorbed in a game. "Basically, children learn through movement. The tried and tested toys like skipping ropes and balls teach them all sorts of things about distance and speed and how they occupy their space."

As the move towards more pre-school provision grows here, Quinn says we should re-examine what we mean by education. "I am worried by the increasing number of children at pre-school writing their name or drawing the number 2. "It's as if children have to bring something home which proves they have been doing some kind of useful work all morning. "In fact, half the time the children haven't yet grasped the concept of "two-ness" - giving them the opportunity to splash about with some water would have been much more beneficial. "Splashing around with water may not strike parents as an obvious way of learning leading to understand mathematical concepts - but children who spill and pour are learning, almost by accident, about ideas like evaporation." "If they have the opportunity to explore like this," Quinn says, "to get a feel for 3D and 2D by playing with bricks or a sense of space through playing cut and paste, when children start to learn maths at school they will only be learning language for what they have seen before. It will be easier to teach and to learn."

Quinn lists a number of important criteria children need so they can play, including adequate space, safety, privacy and freedom. "Children need to have uninterrupted play, and to be allowed to be spontaneous," she says. "Children who get playdough and makes anything they like will learn more than a child who gets a box of moulds with seven dwarfs. The dwarfs may look like dwarfs, and the playdough shape may not look like anything at all, but in play where you have had the freedom to make mistakes, you learn how and why things happen. "Children learn through trial and error, for themselves. When we figure something out like that, we are much less likely to ever forget - which is really the ideal kind of learning."