Holiday Play Schemes

(asked on 7th July 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to his Department's press release of 22 June 2020 entitled Thousands of children to benefit from free meals and activities, by what date he plans to announce whether the Holiday and Activities and Food programme will continue beyond summer 2020.


Answered by
Vicky Ford Portrait
Vicky Ford
This question was answered on 15th July 2020

Our Holiday Activities and Food programme is integral to our approach to provide healthy food and activities to children over the summer. We have announced 17 local authority areas that will benefit from this programme, providing thousands of children with access to healthy meals and enriching activities, and build on the success of the 2018 and 2019 programmes. Grant funding was allocated based on a competitive bidding process.

We have worked with our Holiday Activities and Food coordinators to ensure that the programmes will support children and families through the disruption caused by COVID-19. We will set our future plans for this area in due course.

Provision for free school meals is ordinarily term time only. However, owing to the COVID-19 outbreak, we fully understand that children and parents face an unprecedented situation over the summer. To reflect this, we will be providing additional funding for a Covid Summer Food Fund. This will support families with children who are eligible for free school meals to receive food vouchers covering the 6-week holiday period. The department’s guidance on providing free school meals during the COVID-19 outbreak is available here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-free-school-meals-guidance/covid-19-free-school-meals-guidance-for-schools.

We have also recently announced a £1 billion Covid catch-up package to directly tackle the impact of lost teaching time. £650 million will be shared across state primary, secondary and special schools over the 2020-2021 academic year. Schools are best placed to decide how this money is spent, but that can include, where appropriate, running summer schools.

Following the confirmation from my right hon. Friend, the Prime Minister, that holiday clubs will now be allowed to reopen during the summer holidays, we have published guidance on community activities, holiday and after-school clubs, as well as other out-of-school provision for children over the age of 5. The guidance is available here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/protective-measures-for-holiday-or-after-school-clubs-and-other-out-of-school-settings-for-children-during-the-coronavirus-covid-19-outbreak.

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