Agenda item

7.1

Fidelma Guinan, Commissioning Officer, gave a presentation on the Holiday Activities and Food (HAF), a national Department for Education programme.

The first share of funding was made available to support school age children in 2020 and it had been a challenge to distribute activity packs and food hampers during the first year of the pandemic.

2022 was the third year of this funding, and the challenge was to spread the £2.7million funding across the city to address the gap in provision for children over the holiday periods. This funding was based on the numbers of children eligible for free school meals in Sheffield.

Minimum standards were set by the Department for Education and aimed to support high quality provision coordinated across a local area.  This included provision of healthy food, enriching activities, physical activities, nutritional education, and a core set of policies and procedures.

Consultation had taken place with over 800 children to understand what they would like to do and eat. During the summer of 2022 there would be seven Holiday Activities and Food locality coordinators working across the city to deliver activities.

Fidelma Guinan outlined the branding for the scheme and noted the website which had full details of the diverse range of activities on offer for children of different age groups across Sheffield: https://sheffieldhealthyholidays.org

7.2

Debbie Mathews, Chief Executive Officer of Manor Castle Development Trust, gave some background on the Holiday Activities and Food programme in her area, which included:- 

• Holiday Hunger was delivered in 2017/18. Voluntary Action Sheffield was the accountable body and had applied for funding and was successful. This covered the east of Sheffield (Darnall, Manor Castle, Park, Arbourthorne and Richmond)

• In 2019 the programme was devolved to Local Authorities and Sheffield used a subcontracting model allowing local anchor organisations to deliver in Sheffield. Lockdowns during the pandemic had required a focus on getting food parcels out to families reliant on Free School Meals.
• In 2020 there had been a mix of food parcels and some limited face to face activity.
• In 2021 there had mainly been face to face activities. The Department for Education have announced a 3-year programme from Easter 2022.

7.3

Debbie Mathews explained that there had been challenges around delivering the programme and that it was important to consider the legacy and activities that could continue beyond the programme. The east of Sheffield had a large number of children eligible for free school meals, and there was a particular challenge of reaching teenagers. An evaluation process was in place when allocating funding to providers, aiming to share resources fairly.

The IPAL booking system was useful but challenging for families that were digitally excluded or where English was not their first language.

Half term holidays were covered by Sheffield City Council and were not comparable in terms of activities on offer. It was now hoped to plan further ahead, ie for the year ahead rather than to the next school holiday.

7.4

Debbie Mathews outlined the positive aspects of the programme. A large percentage of children had been reached, providing a good offer of activity and food, and this offer was improving all the time. The programme had also built on local knowledge and relationships, particularly with providers and schools.

7.5

Debbie Mathews outlined the next steps:-

•       Work with ward-based allocations using the free school meal data to focus the resources where they are needed.

•       Work out how to support schools to target the eligible children.

•       Look at ways of assessing value for money and reach with the new monitoring

•       More tailoring of the commission to ensure it provides what children and young people want.

•       Support providers to meet the due diligence requirements.

•       The summer programme was ready to go and plans were underway for October half term.

7.6

The Chair noted that it was important not to stigmatise children.

In response, Debbie Mathews explained that some providers had been able to match fund and offer some paid places for peers that were not eligible. This aimed to help destigmatise the offer and to increase reach but was work in progress.

7.7

Councillor Drabble felt there was an imbalance regarding inclusion of organisations in Richmond and wished to understand the efforts being made to address this and to ensure that children in Richmond were supported.

Debbie Mathews advised that Richmond had a budget allocation proportional to free school meals and a Richmond budget. Some providers were already working in this area. During the pandemic work was carried out with smaller organisations to help with delivery of the programme. The relationships with provider were now in place and conversations/sharing of information could continue to take place. Due diligence requirements had increased as the programme had developed and for some providers this had been a challenge and sometimes excluded them.

The Chair noted that it was important to continue these conversations to ensure that all the organisations involved were able to develop and to continue to have a voice.