Abstract
Nutritional education is a recent, mandatory inclusion within the quality standards framework for the Holiday Activities and Food (HAF) programme in England; funded by the Department for Education (DfE). Whilst research has been conducted regarding nutritional education in other contexts, such as schools and community organisations, to the authors’ knowledge, no published research has yet explored nutritional education within HAF. The current study therefore aimed to explore the implementation, delivery, and perceived facilitators, barriers and impacts of nutritional education across a number of Local Authorities delivering HAF in England. Purposive sampling (n = 11) was used to recruit HAF leads involved in nutritional education, to participate in semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis showed that nutritional education is currently delivered through a variety of modes including face-to-face, online, and take-home methods, all of which require a range of considerations in terms of implementation, delivery, and associated impacts, with some holiday clubs offering no nutritional education. According to participating HAF leads, nutritional education was used as a mechanism to enhance children’s and parents’ cooking confidence and competence, to improve dietary intake, and to increase understanding of issues such as food sustainability, environmental impacts, and food provenance. Although there are many examples of innovative practice, the findings suggested that COVID guidelines proved challenging for providers to include nutritional education within HAF delivery during 2021. Further, whilst the quality standards framework for nutritional education provides flexibility in terms of implementation and delivery, specific guidance, and monitoring of provision is required to ensure quality assurance and consistency across the HAF programme.
Highlights
During term-time, almost 20% of school-aged children in England are eligible for free school meals [1,2], with research by The Food Foundation demonstrating that approximately 2.5 million children experienced food insecurity in the six months up untilJuly 2021
Four main themes were identified from the narrative data collected from Holiday Activities and Food (HAF) leads: (1) the aims and objectives of HAF nutritional education; (2) the modes of delivery used for HAF nutritional education; (3) facilitators and barriers to the planning, implementation, and delivery of HAF nutritional education; and (4) the perceived impacts of HAF nutritional education
HAF leads explained that despite the coronavirus pandemic restrictions, which disrupted HAF programmes, many families still enjoyed attending face-to-face nutritional education sessions and often requested this mode of delivery: “we found that people wanted to meet face-to-face
Summary
During term-time, almost 20% of school-aged children in England are eligible for free school meals [1,2], with research by The Food Foundation demonstrating that approximately 2.5 million children experienced food insecurity in the six months up untilJuly 2021. Without free school meal provision during school holiday periods, many families face increased financial pressures and are at further risk of food insecurity, known as holiday hunger [3,4]. To alleviate these issues, holiday clubs, which extend beyond solely providing access to food, have formed over recent years [5,6]. Food diaries have demonstrated that attendance at holiday clubs improves dietary intake, with a higher consumption of core-foods on attendance days [7], and better adherence to UK dietary guidelines [11,12] Both children and parents have reported numerous positive benefits of attending.
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