Agenda item

Summer in the City is the highlight of the council’s delivery of the Holiday Activity and Food Programme. This report provides an overview of delivery this summer.

Peter Haylock (Operational Director of Education and SEND) provided an overview of the delivery of the Summer in the City programme this summer. The programme aimed to deliver enriching activities and food across the school holidays.

Jacqui McShannon, (Director of Children's Services) commended the Summer in the City programme, the staff invited, and all 28 providers involved for their amazing work over the summer this year. She highlighted that the programme was fantastic and enriching. However, they did encounter some difficulties with ghost bookings, the bad weather and uniformed services having new age restrictions.

Councillor Aliya Afzal-Khan emphasised that Summer in the City was a great programme with the number of participants and providers kept going up in the past three years. She asked for the definition of the term 'unique children and young people’. Jacqui McShannon noted that the term distinguished itself from total headcount as some of the participants took part in more than one event. That was why 3,435 unique children and young people had resulted in 18,998 total attendances. As to why the number of unique participants was lowest among the three years in 2023, Peter Haylock said it might be due to bad weather and more people travelled out of London after the lifting of the COVID restrictions. The new age restrictions imposed by the uniformed services might also contribute to the low attendance.

On Councillor Afzal-Khan’s concern about enlisting the breakdown in attendance and how did it guide future planning, Jacqui McShannon explained that although the Summer in the City programme was targeted at all children, the aim was to reach children that might not benefit from summer vacations. The breakdown helped the Children’s Service gain a better understanding of the uptake interest for forward planning purpose.  She added that the same set of data was not listed for the past two years because of the special circumstances back then when the country was still under COVID restrictions. Jacqui also noted that the demographic data compared well with the overall data of the borough, and the programme was reaching children as intended reflecting good accessibility. She hoped the enhanced promotion of the programme through social media and schools had improved its visibility. Councillor Afzal-Khan said she saw a lot of promotion of the programme in social media and noted that a couple of headmasters had received the information leaflets.  She considered it might be helpful to encourage the schools to distribute the leaflets to the parents early to help boost the attendance.

Nandini Ganesh commented that to assure the parents about programme safety and quality, it might be useful to state the programme was suitable for children and list the providers involved. 

Councillor Mercy Umeh congratulated officers on their work in the success of this programme. She highlighted the positive feedback received from The Nourish Hub, one of the providers at this year's Summer in the City programme.

Jacqui McShannon undertook to take on board members’ comments to make the event more appealing among children and young people.  She took the opportunity to send a special compliment to the Mayor who did a lot of promotion in the social media to motivate young people to join the programme.

The Chair remarked that it had been amazing to see the love and care that had gone into a number of activities in the event.

RESOLVED

That the Committee noted and commented on the report.