Exploring the feasibility of using evidence-based feeding practices to promote children's healthy eating in holiday clubs.

Objective: Encouraging healthy eating is a public health priority in the United Kingdom (UK), given the high prevalence of poor diet and overweight/obesity among school-aged children. Holiday clubs are organisations providing childcare and activities during the school holidays and frequently provide food to children at risk of food insecurity, primarily through government-funded programmes like the Holiday Activities and Food programme. However, the research suggests that holiday clubs could do more to maximise opportunities to promote children's healthy eating by using evidence-based feeding practices.

Staff perspectives on the feeding practices used in holiday clubs to promote healthy eating in disadvantaged communities.

An increasing number of holiday clubs provide free meals to alleviate children's hunger during the school holidays. Holiday clubs are well-placed to promote healthy eating among children from disadvantaged communities who may be at risk of experiencing food insecurity, but currently little is known about the feeding practices used by staff and whether these are conducive to maximising opportunities to promote healthy eating. Unlike previous research which has predominantly studied feeding practices in parent-child dyads and childcare settings, this qualitative study explored staff perspectives on the feeding practices they use to promote healthy eating within nine UK holiday clubs working with children from disadvantaged communities.

Adaptations to Holiday Club Food Provision to Alleviate Food Insecurity During the Covid-19 Pandemic.

Holiday clubs play a pivotal role in providing food and vital enrichment opportunities to alleviate food insecurity among children during the school holidays (holiday hunger). The need for these opportunities increased substantially for families throughout 2020, as food insecurity quadrupled in the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic. In this qualitative study, holiday club staff from England and Wales reflected on the adaptations they implemented in order to maintain food supplies and food-related enrichment activities for families during the first UK national Covid-19 lockdown and subsequently throughout the summer of 2020.

Opportunities and Challenges Arising from Holiday Clubs Tackling Children's Hunger in the UK: Pilot Club Leader Perspectives.

With the school holidays being recognised as a high-risk time for children to experience food insecurity, there is a growing prevalence of school holiday initiatives that include free food. However, information is lacking into what constitutes effective practice in their delivery, and how this can be evaluated. This paper provides insight from individuals who implemented a pilot of a national project which provided free food for children at UK community summer holiday sports clubs in 2016.

Correction to: A Systematic Review of the Evaluation of Interventions to Tackle Children's Food Insecurity.

The original version of this article unfortunately contained mistakes in Tables captions.

A Systematic Review of the Evaluation of Interventions to Tackle Children's Food Insecurity.

Purpose Of Review: To synthesise the research which has sought to evaluate interventions aiming to tackle children's food insecurity and the contribution of this research to evidencing the effectiveness of such interventions.

Recent Findings: The majority of studies in this review were quantitative, non-randomised studies, including cohort studies. Issues with non-complete outcome data, measurement of duration of participation in interventions, and accounting for confounds are common in these evaluation studies.