ACCOUNTANT Ginny Harrison spends a lot of time playing with toys - she's a whizz at board games and can build an impressive Eiffel Tower out of magnets. Ginny runs the Formative Fun toy shop in Northallerton High Street.

She has an eight-year-old son and spent a lot of time going back and forth to Harrogate to buy toys from the Formative Fun shop there. "Then I discovered it was a franchise and thought it made sense to have a shop of my own," she says.

Formative Fun describes itself as the place "where learning is child's play". And there is certainly a strong educational element underlying the shop. There are no Barbies or WWF figures but lots of brightly coloured toys designed to stimulate a child's imagination. "But first and foremost they have to be fun. If they're not, then no child will play with them so there's no point," says Ginny.

Biggest sellers at the moment are those Geomag magnetic bars that you can put together to build all sorts of models. They're very simple and very compulsive (the Eiffel Tower took 600 pieces). "They're suitable for quite young children, from about four or five, but we also have 12 and 13-year-olds come in for packs of them. They're ageless," says Ginny.

Other big sellers are dolls; houses and the Groovy Girls and Lily Dolls - dolls to be dressed up in sets of clothes, but these dolls don't have the equivalent of a 44D chest size.

There are lots of noisy pre-school toys, dressing up clothes (fairies and angels are particularly popular at this time of year), Brio train set, lots of arts and crafts ideas, and plenty of games and puzzles including old favourites such as Mousie Mousie, fishing games, versions of wobbly tower games, and lots of variations on basic board games, including a Harry Potter Diagon Alley. There is also a maths version of Scrabble and a section devoted to National Curriculum textbooks which hints that this is a slightly different toyshop.

Teacher Jane Warren started Formative Fun in 1991 in order to help parents encourage their children. Toys are all chosen to help a child's development. Many tie in with the needs of the National Curriculum and all the franchisees have training in the National Curriculum.

"That doesn't make us experts," says Ginny hastily, "but we are advisers and we work very closely with schools."

Among the things they do are maths nights. "We all know that ways of doing maths have changed since we were in school - even for accountants - so we help schools organise evenings for parents."

They also do fund-raising in schools and homes - a scheme so successful that Ginny is out virtually every night between now and Christmas.

Formative Fun is also particularly geared to children with special needs. Given a particular difficulty or learning problem, from attention deficiency to problems with numbers or co-ordination, they can suggest a toy which might help to stimulate a child's learning. This service is available in the shops, but is particularly good on the website.

Best of all, though, is that all the staff are encouraged to play with the toys, to get to know all about them so they can talk confidently. A toy shop with added knowledge.

Sounds like child's play.

Formative Fun, 85/86 High St, Northallerton. There are also Formative Fun shops in Claypath, Durham; Beulah St, Harrogate; Pilgrim Street, Newcastle and Kirkgate, Ripon. www.formative-fun.com