Holiday Activities and Food annual report

Highlights of 2023

DfE funding allocation of £822,840 for 2023 in Gateshead to fund Holiday Activities and Food (HAF) over the Easter, Summer and Christmas school holidays for benefits-related Free School Meal (FSM) recipients and vulnerable children.

The holiday clubs in Gateshead were delivered in 63 venues: 13 community organisations, 22 schools (including 4 secondary and 3 special schools), 12 sports venues, 3 Arts and Theatre Groups, 4 Pop Ups, 5 Family Hub's, 2 refugee and asylum groups and 2 church organisations.

Almost 25,000 places were delivered across the three programmes.

In 2023 HAF funded over 100 educational/cultural/enriching visits for families including:

a day at the beach
a day in the woods
ice skating
museum visits
cinema
pantomime
art galleries
ten pin bowling
cooking

The programme was very popular and was well received by children and young people and their parents and carers.

beekeeping

Boxing group

Football

plants

Storytime at baltic

Football pop up

beekeeping

Gateshead Football Club Foundation summer 2023 (case study)

As around 36% of children in Gateshead live in poverty, Gateshead FC Community Foundation's primary focus is to inspire aspirations in marginalised and disadvantaged children and young people across the low-income communities of Gateshead. They do this through fun and meaningful activities such as football, sports and group games, mental health awareness, arts and crafts, cookery, life skills, and cultural outings.

During the school holidays there are very few free activities around for children and families to partake in to relieve the boredom and to give the parents a break from childcare.

The Foundation's range of summer activities aim to appeal to all children across the board; hence our activities are not limited to just football and sports.

By working with many funders and organisations the Foundation was able to run 30 events over the holidays to cater for children's needs.

For the children into sports there was football, tennis and boxing and for the creative there was storytelling and crafting sessions along with several family trips and breakfast clubs.

As well as running sessions where participants had to book the Foundation ran a number of football pop-ups in local parks which was a huge success introducing the community to the Foundation.

With 315 individual children attending our football camps and pop-ups and all our other activities being fully booked it has been a very successful summer. Our following on social media also increased as parents were keen to find out about future activities.

We continually take feedback from the children and parents at the activities to ensure we are delivering what the community of Gateshead want and feed this into future planning for the next school holiday.

When planning and running holiday activities the key things, the Foundation has learnt are:

If the activity is limited to a fixed number of bookings do not make all places available via the booking form keep some back. This will allow you to help families where they were only able to book for example 2 spaces when they needed 3.
Think out the box when it comes to facilities. The Foundation would normally run 9 camps at the stadium over the summer holidays, we decided this summer to only run 6 at the stadium and with the money saved from facility hire we were able to run 6 pop-up sessions in local parks where facility hire was free.
If you are running the same activity throughout the holiday period, continually get feedback and change the activity next time based on that feedback.
Look for collaborations to expand your skill set. The Foundation teamed up with Go the Distance to provide boxing sessions to a group of children.