A question of justice: are holiday clubs serving the most deprived communities in England?

ABSTRACT

In response to the problem of holiday hunger, hundreds of local “holiday clubs” have recently been established across the UK. This research examines the spatial relationship between income, childhood deprivation, ethnicity and holiday clubs across 32,844 Lower Super Output Areas (LSOAs) in England to determine if these clubs are currently operating in an inclusive fashion. Data on the location of holiday clubs comes from a national survey. Binary logistic regression results suggest that holiday clubs are likely to operate in economically disadvantaged areas. At the same time, clubs are not distributed equally by ethnicity. That is, holiday clubs operated by voluntary organisations are more likely to be situated in LSOAs that are disproportionately white and English\British and less likely to be situated in LSOAs that are disproportionately ethnic minority. This finding has important implications for the pursuit of holiday clubs as a policy mechanism for addressing access to food in light of the state’s failure to adequately feed all of the country’s children.

KEYWORDS:

• Holiday hunger
• food insecurity
• food justice
• holiday clubs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Emily Mann http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0380-0137

Notes

1 The UK government is currently proposing measures that would reduce access to Free School Meals or many low-income households (see Royston 2018).

2 In England in 2016 a total of 1.1 million children were eligible for and claimed free school meals (Department for Education 2016b).

3 The term “holiday club” can mean numerous things. It generally refers to some type of holiday provision for children, which can be paid or free. The clubs often one or a combination of the following: breakfast, lunch, physical activity, and childcare, among others. In the case of the present study, we are focusing on clubs that are offered in the summer months, which are free to attend and provide a free meal. We discuss this in more detail in the Data & methods section.

4 UK pupils are on holiday for approximately 14 weeks annually. Therefore household budgets for children receiving FSM need an average of £142.80 per child to maintain the same level of food provision as when attending school.

5 Further details of these holiday clubs can be found at https://www.tlg.org.uk/your-church/run-a-programme/make-lunch; http://www.mayorsfundforlondon.org.uk/programme/kitchen-social/; http://www.streetgames.org/fandf/fit-and-fed.

6 University of Northumbria’s Faculty of Health and Life Sciences Ethics Board approved this research.

7 This is from the IDAC Index. This includes people out of work and in receipt of benefits, those that are in work but who have low earnings, and are in receipt of Child Tax Credit. In the ten most deprived local authorities around a third or more of all children lived in income deprived families (Department for Communities and Local Government 2015).

8 We also estimated the models using rare events logistic regression as there are nearly thirty-one thousand neighbourhoods without a club and only 98 neighbourhoods with one or more clubs (King and Zeng 2001). Both the traditional binary logistic and rare events logistic regression models produced very similar results, so we report the traditional results for ease of interpretation.

9 In models not reported here, we estimated equations for each dependent variable where we included only one of the three deprivation variables (i.e. income, % of Single Parent Unemployed Households, and IDACI) at a time to see if they produced any meaningfully different results that the full models reported in Table 2. It is possible, since these three variables measure similar concepts then multicollinearity could affect the estimates. The main findings in the models regarding child deprivation and ethnicity are the same in all of the models. The main differences are that median income and % of Single Parent Unemployed Households significantly predict holiday clubs when they are in the model separately, however they lose significant in the full models.