Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to help monitor the availability of childcare during school holidays in (a) Suffolk and (b) England.

The department is investing over £200 million per year, until March 2025, in free holiday club places for children from low-income families, through the Holiday Activities and Food (HAF) Programme, with all 153 local authorities in England delivering in the Easter, summer and Christmas holidays.

The HAF Programme supports disadvantaged children and their families with enriching activities, providing them with healthy food, helping them to learn new things, and improving socialisation.

While the Programme is targeted primarily towards children in receipt of benefits-related free school meals (FSM), local authorities also have flexibility to use up to 15% of their funding to target and support other children and families that align with the local authorities’ own priorities.

This summer, the programme reached more than 580,000 children and young people in England, including over 460,000 children eligible for FSM.

Since 2022, the HAF programme has provided 10.7 million HAF days to children and young people in this country. The expansion of the programme year-on-year has meant a total of 5.4 million HAF days provided between Christmas 2022, Easter and summer 2023.

This year, the department has allocated over £2.2 million for the HAF programme to support children and families across Suffolk, building on the £2.2 million that was allocated to them for 2022/23.