Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Education – in the Senedd at 2:01 pm on 9 January 2019.
This is a shared priority for both myself and the new First Minister. We know that the food and fun clubs do indeed play an important role in tackling the issue of food hunger, but they also have an important role in preventing learning loss, which is a real issue for many children, especially those from poorer backgrounds, that can occur over the long six-week summer holiday. I'm delighted to say that we will hopefully move from a situation where we had 53 schemes operating last summer to a situation where we will have 83 schemes operating in this summer to come.
And also we've been able as a Welsh Government—recognising the pressure that is on local authority budgets, we've been able to change the intervention rates. So, Welsh Government is picking up more of the bill to alleviate some of the financial pressures that are on local authorities, and I do hope that that means that the six local authorities that to date have not offered the food and fun programme in the summer holidays will be incentivised to come forward and will want to enable that this service is available to their citizens come the summer holidays.