The Healthy Holidays programme provides activities and food over the Easter, Summer and Christmas holidays to children eligible for Free School Meals, and a small number of additional children who are otherwise vulnerable. Leeds City Council leads the programme, in partnership with Leeds Community Foundation.
The scheme has been running in Leeds since 2017. In 2021, the Department for Education significantly increased funding and committed to this until 2024.
In 2022, Leeds received funding of £3.5 million, covering over 120 schools, 50 third sector organisations and over 20 council provisions. The project aimed to reach over 27,000 children and young people and provide over 200,000 portions of food. Activities included on the programme ranged from sports including swimming lessons, arts, music and creative activities, as well as trips out to visitor attractions and parks.
The programme aim is to provide enriching activities and healthy food but a huge range of additional benefits are also provided including relationship building, safeguarding, mental & physical health, link into wider support networks, social support, friendships, stability, confidence, reducing isolation, wider experiences, fun, informal learning, and lifelong habit building.
Leeds City Council’s catering team, Fareshare and Rethink Food are food providing partners to the scheme. Additionally, charities Hamara and Give a Gift make a culturally appropriate food offer available.
The scheme has also funded Zest, a third sector organisation, to develop a bespoke food and nutrition toolkit to support and offer information to Healthy Holidays providers.
“One young boy has a fairly turbulent home life including social care intervention. He is a kind, caring individual who experiences some issues with only being able to eat certain foods, he is quite shy. Catering Leeds provided hot meals and by day three he was happily tucking in and trying all the food. This was a complete revelation as the young man had strictly controlled his own diet previously in the dinner hall each day at school. This was a hugely unexpected positive outcome. He made some new friends, engaged in new activities, and thoroughly enjoyed two school trips to places he had never visited”
