Annual report for 2022 to 2023.
Healthy Holidays Leeds is the programme of end of term holiday clubs funded through the Department for Education’s (DfE) Holiday Activities and Food Programme (HAF) which is principally targeted at children and young people in receipt of benefits related free school meals and welcoming of those identifying as having a special educational need or disability.
HAF provision aims to provide physical and enriching activities together with a meal, principally hot, to eligible children and young people. The programme seeks to promote nutritional education and healthy lifestyle messages as well as offering opportunities to signpost families to additional sources of support.
Healthy Holidays Leeds
The Healthy Holidays programme in Leeds is coordinated by the council’s Financial Inclusion team and is delivered via three separate strands of provision, namely schools, third sector and Leeds City Council. The schools and Leeds City Council programmes are commissioned centrally with the third sector provision being administered by Leeds Community Foundation on behalf of and in close conjunction with the Financial Inclusion team’s Healthy Holidays coordinator. This joint approach ensures consistency in terms of quality and enables the sharing of best practice across the city’s programme.
Healthy Holidays funding 2022 to 2023
| DfE core funding for Leeds 2022 | £3,491,510 |
| DfE additional funding for Leeds | £169,980 |
| Total HAF funding | £3,661,490 |
| Administrative expenditure | £268,199 |
The administrative expenditure includes all of the costs Leeds City Council have incurred in carrying out the administrative functions of the HAF coordination.
Unique children reached at Easter, Summer and Christmas
| Primary-aged | Secondary-aged |
|---|
| FSM-eligible / Non-SEND | 4036 + 6298 + 3594 = 13,928 | 748 + 1275 + 733 = 2,756 |
| FSM-eligible / SEND | 670 + 844 + 657 = 2,171 | 233 +338 + 119 = 690 |
| Non-FSM-eligible / non-SEND | 619 + 1558 + 489 = 2,666 | 375 + 550 + 282 = 1,207 |
| Non-FSM-eligible / SEND | 189 + 450 + 142 = 781 | 72 + 154 + 82 = 308 |
| Total number of HAF-funded attendees | 5514 + 9150 + 4882 = 19,546 | 1428 + 2317 + 1216 = 4,961 |
| Other free | 30 Ukrainian children | |
|
Total children reached | |
24,537 |
Steering Group
Leeds City Council:
- Chief Officer Community Hubs, Welfare and Business Support
- Youth Service
- Public Health
- Active Leeds
- Breeze
- Children & Families
- Financial Inclusion
- Communities
- Catering Leeds
Leeds Community Foundation
Streetgames
Fall into Place Leeds
Rethink Food
Hamara
Give A Gift
Delivery partners
Schools
2Gether Cluster
All Saint's Richmond Hill C of E Primary School
Allerton C of E Primary School
Bramley Park Academy
Bramley Cluster
Broomfield South SILC
Brudenell Primary School
Bruntcliffe Academy
Carr Manor Community School
Castleton Primary School.
Co-op Academy Leeds
Co-op Academy Nightingale
Co-op Academy Woodlands
Cross Gates Primary School
Grimes Dyke Primary School
Guiseley School
Hillcrest Academy
Horsforth School
Hovingham Primary School
Inner East Cluster
Inner West Cluster
Kippax North Primary School
Leeds East Academy
Middleton Primary School
Morley Cluster
Mount St Mary's Catholic High School
Moor Allerton Hall Primary School
New Bewerley Community School
Ninelands Primary School
Park Spring Primary
Parklands Primary School
Ralph Thoresby School
Reach Primary Learning Centre
Richmond Hill Academy
Robin Hood Primary School
Rothwell Cluster
Roundhay School
Roundhay School - Primary Campus
Ryecroft Academy
Seacroft Grange Primary School
Seacroft Manston Cluster
Shakespeare Primary School
Southroyd Primary School
Springwell Leeds
St Bartholomew's Primary School
St Joseph's Catholic Primary
Strawberry Fields Primary School
Trinity Academy Leeds
Temple Learning Academy
The Ruth Gorse Academy
Thorpe Primary School
Westerton Primary School
West Oaks School
West SILC
Wetherby High School
Woodkirk Academy (Leodis Academies Trust)
Third Sector groups
BARCA Leeds
Brave Words CIC
CATCH Leeds
Complete Woman CIC
Connecting Crossgates
Creative Frame
Cycle Pathway CIC
Dance Action Zone Leeds
Fall Into Place Theatre
Getaway Girls
GIPSIL
Groundwork Yorkshire
Guiseley Community Foundation
Hamara Healthy Living Centre
Heads Together Productions
Health for All
Health for All (The Kids are Alright)
Holbeck Together
Hunslet Rugby Foundation
Hyde Park Source (Cross Green)
Hyde Park Source (Rosebank)
Kicking For Grassroots CIC
Kirkstall Valley Development Trust
Leeds Children's Charity
Leeds Mencap
LS14 Trust
Missional Generation
New Wortley Community Assoc.
Pingpong4u
Reestablish
Season Well CIC
Shantona Women & Family Cent.
St Luke's Cares
St Vincent's Support Centre
Stitch-Up CIC
Team Daniel
The Conservation Volunteers
The Old Fire Station
The Youth Association
The Zone
Zest Health for Life
Community hubs and libraries
Armley library
Burmantofts community hub
The Compton Centre community hub
Dewsbury Road community hub
Garforth one stop centre
Hunslet library
Reginald Centre community hub
Rothwell community hub
Whinmoor Library
Breeze Healthy Holiday camps
Firthfields Community Centre
Little London Primary School
Moortown Methodist Church
South Leeds Hub
Windmill Youth Centre
Woodkirk Valley FC
Additional food support
Fareshare
Give A Gift
Hamara
Rethink
Activity centres
Herd Farm
West Leeds Activity Centre
The staff were always so hands on, helpful and informative, we attended last year and loved it, we were surprised to see that this year it was bigger and better. Thank you so much! We hope we can come again next year!
Healthy Holidays Leeds 2022
Highlights and successes of the programme
The Healthy Holidays programme in Leeds during 2022 had significant success. The programme exceeded our targets in reaching numbers of eligible children and young people.
The breadth of activities was extensive and many providers offered family trips, such as visits to the coast and ‘Winter Wonderlands’, bringing added value to the programme. Much of the food on offer was of the highest quality, prepared and made on site, such as that cooked by the dedicated chef at Herd Farm.
Nutritional education for both children and families was supported through our partnership with Zest Foodwise and the Healthy Eating Toolkits supported this element of the programme at each delivery period. Signposting families to additional sources of support was critically important during 2022 given the ongoing cost of living crisis and the community hub provision led the way in this respect linking families to other council services, NHS and third sector partners who frequently operate out of the same hub building.
These are just examples of the great work which took place under the umbrella of Healthy Holidays Leeds in 2022. Although often hard to quantify, Healthy Holidays provision had clear impact resulting in behaviour change and learning.
During 2022, in Leeds, we recorded 87,588 onsite attendances at Healthy Holidays provision and 167,828 meals were served.
Family testimonials
“One child with anxiety was able to stand up in front of an audience for the first time in her life, and deliver a line. Her mum was in tears over the achievement, and told us it was the best day of her life! The child also tried a variety of foods for the first time, a major breakthrough for her. One girl overcame her sad feelings to share a reading activity with a younger child in the group, delivering beautiful peer-mentoring and creating a shining literacy example.”
”One young girl attended for the first time, very nervous and shy, her communication was brief and quiet but we realised she loved spending time with the goats. We asked her if she would like to attend during the day and spend time with them, learning to care for them, sit with them and feed them and she gladly agreed. She attended only a couple of times a week initially, which then developed into attending a few of the youth sessions a week. She accessed the activities, and workshops, learning about our educational farm, including polytunnels, plus had a hot meal with us every session which at first she seemed uncomfortable to accept. With a real interest growing for the educational farm, she expressed interest in volunteering, since she had experienced what is involved in running the sessions. She is now currently in training to be a volunteer and by the end of the HH provision, her confidence had grown, her communication with other young people was improving and she was gaining skills in terms of animal care and welfare.”
“We had one child with SEND who enjoyed the cooking but struggled to engage with some of the other activities. We asked him if he wanted to help us in the cooking area and he eagerly accepted. The child was promoted to 'young helper' and he thrived in helping the younger children with chopping and gathering the ingredients. The team members helped him to take responsibility and take ownership of his new role. His behaviour drastically improved as we saw him enjoying being a leader and helping the children cook.”
Marketing and promotion
Healthy Holidays in Leeds during 2022 was promoted in multiple ways reflecting the diverse strands of provision in the city but included social media, Leeds City Council and provider websites, traditional flyers and banners as well as direct mailings from Healthy Holidays, through schools and third sector partners. We have anecdotal evidence that word of mouth played its part in the promotion of the scheme with eligible families.
Celebration of the programme took place through social media, traditional media, including local TV news, provider celebration events and presentations to our stakeholders.
Extra funding, support, resources and food
During 2022, our Healthy Holidays providers told us they linked and forged partnerships with other organisations to support their programmes, including commercial retail partners and Leeds BID (Business Improvement District). Centrally, we continue to be alert to opportunities to enhance provision and a great example included the partnership with the Rugby League World Cup through which we secured several hundred tickets benefiting our families.
Family testimonials
"Please keep putting on these events - they’re excellent and invaluable for families who struggle (for all sorts of reasons) with access to other activities."
Food offer
Food provision throughout 2022 was of a high standard in general with all provision meeting children and young people’s dietary needs and cultural requirements. Catering Leeds provided food for the majority of schools, all community hubs and the Breeze Youth Service provision.
Other providers commissioned local catering services but several also chose to focus heavily upon this element of their programme and involve children and young people in the preparation and cooking of meals from scratch.
Several clubs, including those specialising in SEND provision, incorporated restaurant experiences within their programmes offering participants the opportunity to ‘eat out’ which may well be beyond the reach of many families, especially given the ongoing cost of living crisis.
Our central funding of cultural and surplus food hubs brought significant added value to the programme across Leeds enabling providers to add snacks or breakfast to their offer, provide family hampers and/or insert cookery and baking into their activities.
Family testimonials
"We visited Lineham farm and had hot meals including a Christmas dinner which many had not had before, trying new foods and eating lots of fruit and vegetables."
“The children in the cohort sometimes have complicated home lives and it is important that a professional agency interacts with them, especially in the long 6 week holidays. The provision gives them a warm meal which they might not necessarily get at home.”
Enriching activity
Here in Leeds we were delighted with the breadth of activities on offer to our young people and had no concerns in respect of ‘enrichment’.
We saw headteachers leading provision within schools offering ‘forest school’, waterslides and encouraging tasting of home grown rhubarb by comparison to ‘Tangfastic’ sweets.
Leeds City College undertook a programme targeting young people aged 15-16 aiming to familiarise them with the college environment at a less busy period than term time and demonstrating the breadth of opportunity offered under the umbrella of ‘digital skills’.
Leeds City Council’s community hub provision continued the well-developed and comprehensive programme working with libraries.
Active Leeds and commissioned arts and theatre groups.
Within the third sector we saw growing, picking and outdoor cooking sessions as well as programmes with an emphasis on sewing and craft activity.
In 2022, we are confident there was provision tailored for eligible children within Leeds and the range of activities available was too extensive to detail in full.
Family testimonials
Family trip evaluations demonstrated the impact of spending a day away from the local area and the emotional impact of connecting with nature. Both parents and children commented:
"Beautiful views... liked rolling in the sand and getting buried...i liked splashing in the sea with my brother."
"Lots of different things to do and see... liked the tractor... seeing the animals running... it was K's first time seeing animals on a farm... loved seeing my boy running in the fields and laughing."
"I enjoyed knowing that my children had a safe environment to play in, where they could experience new foods, new hobbies and make new friends, all whilst I could sit and enjoy adult conversation with a hot or cold drink. My children loved making things from woodwork, decorating bird houses, and digging for potatoes. One of my children’s personal favourite thing was the minecraft quest.”
Physical activity
100% of our providers met the Framework Standard.
Here in Leeds 100% of our providers met the Framework Standard of children and young people engaging in 60 minutes of physical activity during the Healthy Holidays session and all were assessed as either ‘Good’ or ‘Excellent’ in this area.
Again, the types of activities on offer were broad, ranging from traditional football and multi-sports based camps to dance based workshops and activity centre assault courses. We continued to encourage off site trips as part of Healthy Holiday provision and this promoted participation in activities such as ice skating, roller blading and high ropes. We continued to invest in ‘Swimming Catch Up’ sessions for children and young people who may have missed out on lessons due to previous Covid restrictions or who have otherwise low attainment in respect of this lifesaving skill.
Providers worked hard to ensure sessions, especially in relation to physical activity, were accessible and tailored to the children and young people they were working with. For example, one provider worked with Active Leeds to secure dedicated swimming for young people in need of the tuition but who would not have attended a session with younger children.
Family testimonials
“Fantastic! We hope that this continues as the majority of our children don't swim outside of school and often can't make the appropriate progress during the curriculum based lessons - the catch up programme allows them to gain water confidence in advance of their school swimming lessons or if they are attending after their school swimming lessons it gives them an opportunity to strengthen their skills."
Nutritional education
Our commissioning of Zest Foodwise to undertake work specific to nutritional education and accessible to all HAF providers produced excellent resources promoting the key elements of nutritional education for children and families, including the comprehensive Healthy Eating Toolkits. At Christmas, Zest Foodwise devised provider training on games for children and young people to support fun learning in relation to healthy eating. Some providers had told us they struggled with the nutritional education requirement of the scheme. However, through Quality Assurance it often became clear that nutrition and healthy lifestyle messages were embedded within provision, especially the multi sports based clubs where hydration and healthy food were highlighted as critical to athletic performance. Other providers were confident in this area, an example being Season Well, who describe themselves as:
"We inspire and enable people to grow, cook and eat more seasonal, sustainable fruit, herbs and vegetables. We aim to connect people with where food comes from and its impact on their wellbeing and the wellbeing of the planet. Through cooking and food growing workshops we aim to upskill people to be able to grow their own food and know how to cook with fruit and vegetables when they're in season. We work with organisations to help them set up their own food growing and cooking programmes with their communities."
Healthy Holidays Leeds held a competition at each delivery period during 2022 encouraging participants to ‘Celebrate Fruit and Vegetables’. We received many ingenious entries demonstrating the artistic skills of our children and young people and producing multiple worthy winners!
Thank you this is fantastic news! We can present them in assembly.
Family testimonials
“The feedback we received from the Pizza Club was ‘wow, am I actually okay to cook now’, which led me to believe that they had never been given the opportunity to explore cooking.”
"We saw an excellent initiative delivered through a school with You Tube videos created with teachers cooking; children taking home ingredients and basic equipment and then leading parents and carers through the recipe achieving a home cooked meal for the household."
"We had one particular individual who we had tried to get involved in our Easter and Summer programmes but who had not been able to come to any of the sessions. We discovered that this was largely a financial/transport issue which we were able to help the family out with and he was able to attend for the whole 7 days. ‘B’ comes from a background of high poverty and lives with one parent and there have been issues with school attendance and fitness/lifestyle. He hugely benefited from the activities themselves, the contact with the strong adult role models, the fruit provided and the hot, healthy lunch which he greatly enjoyed. He also benefited from the contact with his peers as quite often he didn't leave his flat for the whole of the holidays and was very lonely. He had also clearly made some friendships with some of the other young people and when I asked him about the club he told me 'I've had the best time made some great friends and cannot wait until the Easter activities."
Celebrating inclusion for children and young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND)
In Leeds, we commission bespoke Healthy Holidays provision through schools for children and young people who identify as having special educational needs and/or disabilities. We know we are fortunate to have the engagement of our specialist schools enabling this tailored provision. However, in addition, our generic Healthy Holiday providers are inclusive and encourage participation from children and young people with additional needs as our case studies demonstrate.
3950 children and young people identifying as having a special educational need or disability took part in Healthy Holidays Leeds in 2022, over 16% of our total participants.
Family testimonials
“We are a disability-positive organisation and work with neurodiverse children regularly in our youth theatres. Our staff have a pre-existing relationship with most of the disabled children who attended the summer provision, which enables us to cater seamlessly for their individual needs. We work in a holistic fashion, with children using breakout spaces and teepees to relax where needed. Our Youth Director trained as a teacher in a primary school which incorporated a school for the Deaf, so she was able to utilise this skill set for the two deaf enrollees. Our support staff ratio allows us to provide additional support during activities for children who need it.”
“One family has a child with special needs who are also struggling financially. We were not only able to give the children the opportunity to take part in fun activities we were also able to refer mum to our food pantry for support. Her children, one with SEND, responded really well to the cooking activities and a normally 'faddy' eater was happily found tucking into Lentil Ragu with a tomato and vegetable sauce. Mum is convinced that he would not have tried that at home. One of the loveliest activities that children got to take part in this summer was going on a tour of the farm. Our grower showed the children, and parents, around all our different crops and was delighted when every child tried at least one new vegetable harvested straight from the field. The family were also able to take home some surplus veg. All parents and carers have to stay with their children at the farm and we believe that it is a fabulous opportunity for parents and carers to enjoy time with their children to socialise and make new friends and support networks and to relax. This mum certainly benefited from being able to enjoy the sunshine, a chat and to relax.”
Signposting and referral
The opportunity to signpost and refer families to further sources of support added value to the Healthy Holidays programme and included:
- Advice Agencies
- DWP
- Employment and Skills
- Local Council Tax Support
- Free School Meals
- Leeds School Uniform Exchange
- Healthy Start
- and many more...
Sessions also raised awareness of providers’ core term time activities promoting participation for children and young people on an ongoing basis.
Family testimonials
"A number of families provided feedback about how essential these food hampers were to them over this period when they would have otherwise struggled to maintain a healthy balanced diet for the children."
"Vi and Jo are sisters who came to us for the first time during the summer healthy holidays programme. They were very thin and filled their pockets with food every day. We spoke to their mum about the local food pantry and helped her with some community resources (she had struggled previously as she doesn't speak much English). We saw the sisters during term time in youth theatre and monitored their condition, celebrating improvements with them. During winter healthy hols, the girls were noticeably less worried about grabbing food, and are not as thin as they were. Other benefits such as improved concentration are apparent as well. Their mum spoke about the summer as a turning point for their family, and feels they are much more able to live well than they were. This winter we were able to provide additional advice about heating and gave mum a warm space in the community centre while the sessions ran.”
Healthy Holidays Leeds 2023
In Leeds, the programme for 2023 will continue with provision being funded and delivered through schools, third sector organisations and council provision through community hubs and Breeze.
Around 112 clubs will run in 2023, including tailored provision for children and young people identifying as having a special educational need or disability.
Bespoke provision meeting the needs of the Gypsy, Traveller and Roma Community has been funded and targeted work aimed at families with lived experience of domestic abuse is scheduled.
Providers have been encouraged to enrich their programmes with trips and multiple providers are cooking meals from scratch with participation from children and young people. Training on food preparation and healthy eating has been commissioned centrally, alongside additional food support.
We are aiming to improve upon our booking processes to improve accessibility for families and directly link households with additional support, such as Leeds Databank and celebrate Leeds Healthy Holidays at the Carriageworks Theatre.
