How did you provide participants and their families with information, signposting or referrals to other services and support?
We produced a HAF Access to Resources booklet that is made available to all our HAF providers to hand out to families during activities. This was updated prior to each HAF holiday to ensure the information contained was relevant and up to date. It included information on free and low-cost foods, Food banks (detailing local information for each district), Food support for under 4s, more help feeding the family, Physical Activity Guidelines, Household Support, Welfare and health support, Mental health and wellbeing, and Dental and oral health and included contact details and addresses for each organisation or services.
A link to this booklet is available on our Gloucestershire HAF website but hard copies could also be printed for providers to display and share at their venues. Link to our online access to Resources: https://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/education-and-learning/holiday-activities-and-food-programme/other-support-and-resources-for-haf/
Our resident nutritionists have also produced a provider recipe booklet and a family recipe booklet. These have been designed to be easy to follow and suit all budgets. Some of the recipes included in the family recipe booklet have been provided by parents/carers. Link to our library of booklets: https://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/education-and-learning/holiday-activities-and-food-programme/haf-cookbook/recipes/
In addition, we commissioned HAF Community Connectors based within each district supporting families with transport (to and from activities), booking activities and signposting families to a range of support services on a case-by-case basis.
Which services did you sign post?
Free and low-cost foods, Food banks (detailing local information for each district), Food support for under 4s, more help feeding the family, Physical Activity Guidelines, Household Support, Welfare and health support, Mental health and wellbeing, and Dental and oral health.
Plans for the 2024/25 HAF programme
We established priorities for the delivery of the HAF programme in Gloucestershire following a review of our Theory of Change and in partnership with our Steering group to cover the 23/24 and 24/25 programme years.
Progress against these priorities during 23/24 are provided below:
1. Increasing the overall number of secondary school age children attending HAF provision to be 25% of those attending the programme
We have slightly increased our secondary school age attendance to 26% this year in comparison to 25% in 2022-2023, with help from the success of our pilot HAF Youth Pass offer. This gave young people the opportunity to access HAF provision independently, during their own time by providing them with ticketed activities and a bus pass so that they may be able to get to and from activities with their friends. This was all done with the parents’ written consent.
During our commissioning process when allocating bids to providers, we calculated a 25% target number in each district to reach the demographic. This aided us in making decisions on how to best allocate the provider bids to meet the district’s target for both primary and secondary places.
We found that the Youth Pass was a great success when it comes to targeting secondary school young people and allowed us to reach a total of 26% of secondary school children who are eligible for HAF.
2. Ensure HAF provision for older children with a special educational need and/or disability.
We increased our number of specialist Lot 3 providers on our framework at the beginning of 2024 and therefore have been able to increase the number of sessions and spaces available to children and young people. Our lot 3 providers did not hold any age caps in their activities as they understood that sometimes a young person with SEND may benefit greater from an activity traditionally aimed at a younger audience, therefore there was greater flexibility in the activities they can attend. However, we still asked providers to provide a breakdown of children they aim to reach between primary/secondary so we could ensure there was a wide range of accessible provision available for 4–16-year-olds in the county.
During our scoring moderation sessions for Lot 3, we worked with specialist colleagues such as the short breaks team who supported us by being part of the scoring team and providing their insight around specialist provision to ensure we commissioned the right sort of activities and have a spread across the county.
As well as this, after making ‘All About Us/Me’ a requirement to all our providers we were able to increase the accessibility of sessions delivered by all our providers and given families an opportunity to discuss their child’s needs before booking any activity to ensure it will be accessible to them.
We worked with each of our district leads to ring fence an allocation of their funding to offer bespoke activities and activity packs to the children and young people with highly complex needs that would not be able to access the core HAF offer to ensure they were still able to participate in some way during the holidays.
3. Track the uptake of vouchers for SEND children not able to access HAF food.
The summer 2023 survey analysis showed a 2% increase in the percentage of children with SEN accessing activities, and the volume of applications to the offer suggested an increase in dietary requirements being met at activities.
Providers worked with nutritionists to enable them to cater for dietary requirements. This was reflected in the applications to dietary requirement vouchers. Applications have fallen dramatically in the last year, there were 3 applications for spring 2023, 4 in summer 2023, and 6 in winter 2023, compared to 130 (14 children with SEND) in summer 2022 alone.
We will continue to provide this offer from additional grant funding outside of the HAF funding.
4. Analyse those children with an ECHP, Disabilities, and children and young people with a BAME background; attending by geography to ensure our diverse communities across the county are accessing the provision.
Through our reporting and analysis of this, we could target those vulnerable families on an EHCP, with disabilities and who are BAME by what provision they have attended in each district. EHCP currently running at 7% of participants are on an EHCP. Our SEND numbers are currently running at 7% of participants are SEND. 11% of HAF participants identified themselves as belonging to the BAME community. This will continue to be a focus area of our work, reaching into those hard-to-reach communities.
5. Continue to embed good safeguarding practice.
Through our due diligence process, we supported all providers to ensure that their safeguarding policies and procedures include up to date legislation, local contact information for LADO (Local Authority Designated Officer) and Social Care (including out of hours contact information).
It was mandatory that each provider’s Designated Safeguarding Lead and Deputy Lead completed level 3 Safeguarding Training through the Gloucestershire Safeguarding Childrens Partnership (GSCP) who have been commissioned by the HAF team to carry out this training. We also included links to some example policies to use as a guide from the NSPCC website.
We carried out annual Section 11 Safeguarding Audits with each of our providers. This self-assessment tool was approved by the Gloucestershire Safeguarding Children’s Partnership (GSCP) and included an assessment by the GCC HAF team with further support where required. Summary reports of the responses is submitted to the GSCP on an annual basis ensuring safeguarding duties and responsibilities are being met. The HAF steering group has a section on safeguarding and the S11 results are discussed, and actions taken as necessary.
6. Improve provider signposting and referrals.
All providers had access to our HAF Access to Resources booklet, and visibility of these booklets were checked during our quality assurance visits. To make this booklet even more accessible, we introduced a QR code accessible through our parent recipe booklet as this seems to be more popular with families, while also continuing to display a link on our HAF website.
Families could also access a range of signposted services through our HAF Community Connectors who were embedded within their communities and have excellent connections with local organisations and services that families would benefit from should they required further assistance.
7. Continue to improve food and nutrition good practice with providers across the county.
Gloucestershire County Council has supported providers to access Level 2 Food Safety and Hygiene training and Allergy training from the Food Standards Agency (FSA). Each HAF club will have at least one staff member with Level 2 Food Safety and Hygiene certificate and all staff at every HAF club will have completed the allergy training from FSA. We have worked with Environmental Health colleagues to identify and support those providers that need to register as food businesses.
8. Roll out the second phase of the All about Me, all about us pilot including work to incorporate this into the booking system.
We have now made the ‘All About Me/Us’ process mandatory for all providers. We have provided a template and process guide for them to help them get this set up for each individual activity. Two links are now included on each activity booking description. The first is the providers’ ‘All About Us’ which discloses additional information about the provider as well as images for those families who require the additional information and visual aids. The second link takes families to the ‘All About Me’ online form where they can then fill out their details, they wish to disclose to the provider to make sure their child’s needs are met. As well as this, once a parent books onto an activity, in their confirmation email, the two links will be included again. This means all families will have the opportunity to fill this out if they feel the need to.
9. Ensure there is a wide range of activities with good availability for families to book at each HAF holiday.
We have a modified open framework which allows us to constantly give potential providers the opportunity to apply to be on the framework and deliver for HAF.
Currently we have 86 providers on the framework that deliver across all 6 districts within the county.
Using the Commissioning process, we actively seek gaps within our provision and then work with district leads to fill gaps and ensure local families have access to enriching activities and nutritious food.
Our current goal is to expand the range of specialist SEND provision within the county. We are working towards this using outreach work to known specialist providers in each district and working with current providers to extend their provision to be countywide, rather than district specific, expanding the accessibility of the provision for children and young people with SEND.
10. Increase the number of parents and carers responding to the HAF survey.
We have identified that our HAF families are experiencing some survey fatigue since we began holding them in 2021.
In our last summer evaluation meeting, we created a new strategy with our district leads to hold countywide feedback annually to gather information on the impact HAF has had on families. Whilst district leads held smaller questionnaires for families to track progress, understand satisfaction rates and collect feedback to improve future services. We recognised the need to work in partnership with children, young people, and their families to shape a programme that meets the needs across Gloucestershire.
11. Continually improve the functionality and user-experience of the CABS booking system.
We had monthly CABS user group meetings to support the development of the functionality and user experience. In April 2024, we evaluated the current engagement and attendance for the CABS super user group meetings.
In April we also launched our first CABS user group meeting with Co-ordinate Sport, the system host, in attendance, they also agreed to attend our meetings going forward. Having Co-ordinate Sport in attendance allowed providers to not only share best practice between each other but also to ask their queries directly to Co-ordinate Sport. We recorded an action log of the meeting; these actions were then reviewed at the next meeting.
We have received very positive feedback from attendees from the first session and experienced higher attendance rates due to better understanding how to use the system to support bookings. The users could share their feedback/concerns ahead or within the session, Co-ordinate Sport representatives would then directly run through the queries during the session or take them away if they are more detailed. We directly liaised with Co-ordinate Sport ahead of the next session to see if these have been actioned. Not only did users have a chance to interact with Co-ordinate Sport but could also share knowledge with each other.
The meetings have only been in action since April, however, so far, they are making a positive difference to the user experience of CABS. In the Summer 2023, the Parent and Carer Survey provided feedback that some activities could be clearer and include more detail. Using this feedback and through our ‘All About Me’ and ‘All About Us’ process, we were able to embed a process whereby families could include much more information about their child’s needs, behaviours, support required and any dietary requirements. This was sent to the provider who could then contact the families directly to ensure sufficient support was in place prior to their arrival.
Through our soft launch, families were able to view the activities available for the upcoming holiday ahead of the bookings going live. Families could be referred to our HAF Community Connectors for deeper conversations regarding their support requirements and could then be booked on to suitable activities ahead of the live date, ensuring they had the time required to review activities to make sure it was suitable for them and also ensured they had a fair opportunity to book onto activities that might sell out quickly when bookings went live.
12. Increase the number of referrals from partners including Social Care colleagues to the HAF Community Connectors’ Service
We set out clear expectations with our HAF Community Connectors through the mobilisation document produced which included that Community Connectors should ‘Work closely with social workers and other support staff to support the most vulnerable of children to access support in their local area.’ As part of their strategy to reach 20% of free school meal children in each district.
We supported this with quarterly contract monitoring meetings with the Community Connectors where we discussed any barriers they were facing in achieving their aims and how we can work with them to overcome this.
Prior to the summer 2023 HAF delivery, we hosted multiple online sessions with each of our Gloucestershire Social Care Teams. These sessions provided Social Care teams with more information about the HAF programme, how this could benefit the children, young people, and families they work with, and agreed a referral process that enabled Social Care Teams to work with HAF Community Connectors to ensure vulnerable families could access the right provision in their local areas.
In Summer 2023 HAF delivery, we also worked to increase Social Care colleagues’ interaction with HAF and their local HAF Community Connectors by sending them weekly emails to the social care leads in each district. The email included a spreadsheet of all the remaining HAF activities available to book in that district, as well as the type of activity, location, date, time, and direct link to the booking page. We copied in the relevant HAF Community Connector into these emails and encouraged them to contact them to make use of the remaining activities for their families.
13. Continue to ensure that all provider’s monitoring reports are received within the set deadlines.
We had an 80/20 payment process for all providers, 80% of their allocated funding was paid upfront and the final 20% was paid upon receipt of provider monitoring forms and a few other aspects following each HAF holiday. This ensured that monitoring forms were received from each provider.
