Food and Fun School Holiday Enrichment Programme 2016: evaluation report

The school summer holidays are a crunch point for low-income families: children who benefit from free school breakfasts and lunches often miss meals and go hungry once their school shuts for the holidays, while the lack of free play schemes and sports activities impacts most on disadvantaged children. Missing meals, a sedentary lifestyle and social isolation in the school holidays reinforces existing health inequalities and undermines the success of free school breakfast and lunch policies. In this context, new community projects are now emerging to address ‘holiday hunger’. The UK All Party Parliamentary Group on School Food report Filling the Holiday Gap found a range of new projects but these were typically small scale and relying on local activism. The Food and Fun school holiday enrichment programme, developed and piloted in Cardiff in 2015, is the first UK example of a multi-agency project providing healthy meals, nutrition skills, sports and other physical activities in the school holidays.