Holiday club funding plea after grant cut
Stockton CouncilA council is calling for more funding for its holiday activities programme after government support was reduced.
Stockton Council said money from the Department for Education (DfE) for the Holidays Are Fun (HAF) project had dropped from £916,790 last year to £883,540 - a reduction of 3.7%.
Councillor Carol Clark, chair of the children and young people select committee, said the funding "kept going down" for the project, which has been running for five years and offers activities including horse-riding, martial arts and paddle-boarding, as well as healthy meals.
The DfE has been approached for comment.
More than 9,000 children are eligible and demand is expected to rise with the expansion of free school meals, the council said.
The 1,580 children who attended at Easter 2024 took up 5,227 spaces of the 6,000 available.
PA MediaClark said: "The funding goes down every year, but free school meal eligibility goes up.
"More children meet the criteria but we're getting less money.
"I don't know how councils are expected to survive - we can only do so much."
Mandie Rowlands, service lead for school support and sufficiency, said funding had only been agreed until March 2026.
The programme had previously been hampered by a non "user-friendly" booking system but that has now been replaced with a "sophisticated" system which goes live on 4 July, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said.
Ms Rowland said: "We are going to really make sure we concentrate on our 10 most deprived areas and have those activities in all those areas.
"We've had over 50 providers apply, which is creating over 17,000 spaces for the summer."
Councillor Ray Godwin said it was "ironic" that as the booking system was "perfected" the funding could run out.
"I think maybe all the councillors need to lobby to make sure the funding doesn't go away," he said.