The holiday activities and food (HAF) programme provides healthy meals, enriching activities, and free childcare places to children from low-income families, benefiting their health, wellbeing and learning.

Since 2022, the HAF programme has provided 10.7 million HAF days to children and young people in this country. The expansion of the programme year-on-year has meant a total of 5.4 million HAF days provided between Christmas 2022, Easter and summer 2023.
 

The programme, though aimed at children in receipt of benefits related free school meals (FSM) is not exclusively for them and as set out in this guidance, we encourage local authorities to use up to 15% of their funding to provide free or subsidised holiday club places for children who are not in receipt of benefits related free school meals but who the local authority believe could benefit from HAF.