MICKLEHURST All Saints CE Primary has a positive effect on children, even outside traditional term time. In her latest monthly column for The Correspondent, headteacher Laura Trelfa tells how it helped keep kids active, as well as tackle large issues.
THIS February half term, we successfully ran our third holiday club, supported and fully funded by Fuel 4 Fun.
Fuel 4 Fun has been organised through a partnership between Tameside Council, Active Tameside and the Department for Education to offer holiday club places for primary school children who qualify for pupil premium funding and/or free school meals.
The scheme is also focused on tackling food poverty and social equalities by providing the families of participating children with food hampers packed with enough ingredients to make four nutritious family meals five nights a week for each week of the club.
Formed through Tameside Holiday Activity and Food Funding (HAF), up to 25 children had the opportunity to take part in daily sports and craft activities delivered “in house” by a team of committed teaching assistants.
The programme can be run by Active Tameside Coaches, but as a school we feel that we can best meet the needs of the children by delivering the club ourselves using the knowledge and experience of the children we have.
Hayley Simpson, an Active Tameside senior sports coach, visited us to audit our provision and she was impressed by what she saw.
This time, as well as the usual arts and crafts and sports activities children were treated by Jordan from Jalmac Leisure with a bouncy castle day and on the last day of the club, thanks to generous donations from the PTFA, the children enjoyed a party day with lots of party games and fabulous prizes.
We continue to successfully run our holiday clubs which help support our families and children over the school holidays.
The Fuel 4 Fun Programme and the associated funding means that we can run these free of charge with the funding covering labour, utility and food costs.
In this latest holiday club, we also started getting the older children involved in planning and making healthy snacks and lunches for all the children and staff, which they really enjoyed taking responsibility of.
Micklehurst is a relatively small school that has a strong supportive community feel, and this certainly has been replicated with the holiday clubs.
Children of all ages happily participated in varied activities together and staff likened it to having another holiday family, especially as most of the children also attended the previous clubs we have run.