Why Fun is Fundamental: Introducing The Fundamentals
At Fullscope, we work alongside charities supporting children and young people, across our network, one thing has always been clear: fun matters. Not as an optional extra, but as a vital ingredient in building trust, enabling learning, supporting wellbeing and helping children and young people thrive.
That’s why we were proud to support The FUNdamentals, a collaborative research project led by The Open University’s RUMPUS team, exploring how fun is understood, valued and too often sidelined in funding and professional conversations across the children and young people’s sector.
Despite being widely recognised by practitioners, funders and young people themselves as essential, fun can still feel difficult to name. Many organisations know instinctively that enjoyment, joy and play underpin effective work, yet hesitate to talk about them explicitly, particularly in funding contexts. This research set out to ask a simple but provocative question: what could happen if funders valued fun?
Through interviews with charities and funders working across England, The FUNdamentals highlight a striking paradox. Fun is deeply valued on a personal level and widely acknowledged as transformative, yet professionally, it is often treated as frivolous, risky or hard to justify. In some cases, the word “fun” itself feels taboo. The findings point to a wider “fun deficit”, shaped by funding systems, cultural attitudes and long-term pressures on services supporting children and young people.
For Fullscope, these insights resonate strongly with what our partners tell us and with what children and young people themselves say when given the space to be heard. As part of the project, voices from our youth advisory group, Our Voices helped keep the research grounded in lived experience. One particularly powerful observation was that children and young people are rarely asked about joy, fun or enjoyment, despite being regularly consulted on trauma, mental health and adversity.
The report makes a compelling case for reframing how we talk about impact moving away from purely deficit-based narratives and towards approaches that recognise children and young people’s need for joy, connection and agency. It also opens up practical questions for funders, charities and policymakers about language, power and trust, and about what becomes possible when fun is explicitly valued rather than quietly edited out.
“Working with The Open University helped us articulate something we’ve always known instinctively that fun is fundamental to wellbeing and connection. This project validated our experiences and gave us language and evidence to champion fun as a serious and essential ingredient in creating positive change”
Eva Acs, Director, Fullscope
We’re delighted to share the FUNdamentals executive summary and encourage you to read the full report. We also recommend reading our research partners’ blog , which explores the findings in more depth and asks some important and timely questions about how the sector views fun, and why.
At Fullscope, we strongly believe that fun is a human need, not a luxury. This research gives us shared language and evidence to champion what many of us have long known: that fun is not the opposite of serious work with children and young people it is often what makes that work possible.
Visit RUMPUS blog to learn more about this research
If you’re interested in talking about the issues raised in the report get in contact