Addressing Holiday Stress for Low-Income Families

Government guidance on holiday activities and food (HAF), published in December 2022, explains that some families experience stress over the school holidays with children from low-income families being more likely to experience ‘unhealthy holidays’ in terms of diet and physical health.

The HAF Programme was created to address to this problem while the guidance was still being drafted. Of England’s 318 councils, 153 are ‘upper tier’, responsible for running major services including education. The programme has been rolled out to all of these upper tier authorities to co-ordinate and provide free holiday provision including healthy food and enriching activities. The programme is available to children eligible for free school meals, and the local authorities can use up to 15% of their funding to extend places to other vulnerable children if they wish.

Free holiday clubs can benefit children and young people. The clubs work best when they:

• provide consistent and convenient activities
• offer more than just breakfast or lunch
• involve children and their parents in food preparation
• establish relationships with local partners, such as charities and community organisations

Improving Children's Lives Through HAF

Local authorities are responsible for ensuring there are sufficient high quality HAF places. To support them with this, the Department for Education has set up a national support contract, being delivered by Childcare Works, a collaboration between Mott MacDonald and national childcare services provider Hempsall’s.

Childcare Works recognises that holiday activities and food can significantly improve children’s lives. We see the programme as a vehicle for helping children and their families towards happier and healthier lives.

Through the programme we support the provision of food education, sports and enriching activities, safeguarding, disability and inclusion, childcare and childhood development, data analysis and programme management. Our role includes specialist advice, one-to-one meetings, regional knowledge-sharing cluster meetings and training events. We have established an online community, Knowledge Hub which is facilitating knowledge sharing, effective practice and local authority peer support.

The programme kicked off in 2018. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated our investment in technology and this enabled us to virtually meet local authority staff and maintain high levels of online support. We also used IT to share information and collate data through online surveys, helping track the programme’s impact and report it to the DfE.

We work collaboratively with individual local authorities monitoring planning and delivery progress, sharing information to connect local authorities, and sharing best practice. This helps us work collaboratively towards solutions to shared problems, organise meetings to enable peer support, and structure training.

Our collation and analysis of data since the start of the HAF Programme has informed the design of a national £220M programme.

HAF Programme Achievements

Since 2022, the HAF programme has provided 15.6 million HAF days to children and young people in this country. Across the 2023/24 academic year, almost 5 million HAF days were provided during winter, Easter, and summer delivery.

Based on reporting from local authorities, over Summer 2024, local authorities reported that over 628,000 children and young people attended the holiday activities and food programme. Of these participating children, over 511,000 were funded directly by the HAF programme and over 433,000 were receiving benefits-related free school meals. The reports showed that over 9,700 clubs, events or organised activities operated across the country over the summer.