While she quite rightly highlights the fact that there will be large numbers of children on the streets or staring at four walls all summer, her analysis is wrong. This is due, in my opinion, to the rollercoaster expansion of care projects that have caused the decline of good, open access after-school/latchkey clubs and holiday projects - an expansion that the Kids' Clubs Network has skillfully brought about at the expense of all other play provision.
Previous funders - mainly local authorities - of such valuable community-based resources have either ploughed their available funds into care initiatives or cut their funding and are relying on the New Opportunities Fund instead. As a result, we have a service that only children whose parents are in work can afford to access. Ironically, it is the most vulnerable and needy groups - the exact ones the Government claims to want to reach with its erratic child poverty rhetoric - that are missing out, due to non-joined-up thinking.
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