6 - Enriching activities
How did your programme provide opportunities for children and young people to develop and consolidate their skills and knowledge and try out new experiences? Was there a change in young people’s characters / wellbeing and educational attainment?
The approach taken to commission the HAF programme in Staffordshire has ensured a diverse range of providers delivering a wide range of enriching activities.
A number of the HAF clubs provide HAF places in the after school clubs they already run at schools in the school holidays. These are the clubs that offer the usual sporting activities, arts, and crafts. These clubs allow children to build their confidence, be active and socialise with and make new friends, whilst still in an educational setting. This enables them to continue learning and building skills and knowledge. We also have two providers that include swimming lessons in the HAF club and for some of the children and young people it is the first swimming lesson.
We have a specialist wellbeing club for girls and young women, which includes yoga, confidence building sessions and teen health awareness. This club has helped one young woman with low self-esteem, work towards her ambitions of working in theatre and television.
We also had specialist Arts club, which uses art to help children improve their wellbeing whilst also incorporating an hour of physical activity per day. We had two Ukrainian families attend these sessions and the art therapy was vital in helping the children work through their recent experiences in a positive way.
Ukrainian children were encouraged to attend HAF clubs last year, and many of their parents fed back that this had helped children settle into new schools and make friends.
We have also been keen to offer new and unusual activities for children and young people and have worked with providers to increase the offer to try new things and this has included:
- horse riding and grooming skills
- paintballing
- ice skating
- woodland skills
- theatre skills
- radio programmes and production
- boxing
- museum visits
- tennis
One club took children to a specially designed park experience, teaching children in imaginative and game type settings how to keep safe whilst out and about. The experience includes games and night street walking sets providing fun whilst also increasing the children awareness and knowledge of how to be safe, away from home.
Parents have feedback changes in their childrens wellbeing, one parent talked about how working with horses had helped her eldest daughter with her anger management problems. The parent felt this was because her daughter had to be calm around the horses as they are nervous creatures and somehow this had helped her recognise how it can be used in personal and family situations.
A parent wrote in to say that her teenage son had been attending a HAF club and this had reduced her son’s anxiety and his self-harming was almost non-existent.
A great success for the Staffordshire programme has been, three HAF clubs have taken on young people as apprentice coaches and two young people have found work permanently this year in these roles! This is a fantastic achievement which we hope to grow in the upcoming schemes and share at our provider events.
Feedback from schools has been that the children who have attended HAF clubs, return to school with wider friendship groups.
The Summer Reading Challenge reported supported and increased the number of children taking part in reading and by default increasing their educational attainment.