The challenges of delivering HAF

The challenges of delivering HAF by district

Cheltenham

With 39% of the children on FSM in Cheltenham being reached through the HAF programme, a significant challenge is how to ensure the HAF programme is as accessible as possible so that we can engage with the remaining families.

With over 4400 children living in poverty, ensuring as many families as possible can access the HAF activities and ticketed offers with ease remains a key priority for partners in Cheltenham.

A further challenge raised in Cheltenham has been around how the HAF programme can be structured to work towards more sustainable long-term goals.

Cotswolds

In terms of size, it is the largest district of the 6, however one with the lowest population as well as the lowest number of children eligible for free school meals that were scattered across the wards.

The largely rural area with very little public transport made it difficult for eligible families to get to and from provision. Because of this, the district lead put in a transport offer in place through taxi services. 

Gloucester City

The diverse nature of the communities in Gloucester City meant that we needed to ensure that we had an offer that could meet the needs of the children and families living in those communities.

We are fortunate to have a great network of anchor organisations working in many of our wards but there were areas that simply did not have the infrastructure in place to deliver activities.

The challenge was to work with individuals and organisations in those areas, within a small-time frame, to enable them to get the structures in place to be able to deliver the HAF programme in their local community.

Forest of Dean

Travel was most certainly a challenge, not just because of the rural nature and poor levels of public transport coverage but also due to the lack of capacity with alternative options such as taxis.

We also found that many providers only wanted to deliver within the towns and larger villages, leaving large pockets of the Forest of Dean without coverage.

We overcame this by working with the Forest of Dean Youth Association who set their delivery plan based on the gaps in provision.

Stroud

Due to the rurality of the district, distribution and travel become pressing challenges. In order to distribute items such as food hampers and activity packs, we were able to call on our team of Neighbourhood Wardens who delivered many food parcels direct to homes during the Easter and Summer of 2021 and to schools during the Winter.

In terms of travel, we have endeavoured to ensure our provision is a widely spread as possible so that our residents have very little to travel. In situations where travel needed assistance, we worked closely with our family support team at Barnardos to work through each case individually.

Tewkesbury

The short time frame given to plan meant recruitment and decisions were fast tracked and deadlines which had a knock-on effect on structure and staff efforts.

We had a few complaints about eligibility as the criteria changed from the previous seasons therefore families who had participated in the district provision historically had to be signposted to another district which caused frustration amongst families.