Changes to After School Clubs (starting 20/9/24)

As you know we have been running After School Clubs for as many years as we have been here, and we want to continue running them into the future. For a very long time we were funded by Children in Need, and they paid for the salaries of the staff, but in March 2023 they told us that they could not fund us anymore. In March 2024 we were able to ask Children in Need again for funding but again they said no. Last September we reduced the number of days we could run After School Clubs to Wednesday through to Saturday. From this September we are going to run After School Clubs on Fridays and Saturdays. We will continue to run holiday playschemes as they are well attended.

The reasons are:

• Not many children come to the clubs anymore.
• We have not been given any funding to run the clubs.
• There are more clubs run by schools than before.
• Families don’t seem to want their children to come like they did in the past.
• As the numbers have been too low it has been decided that offering 3 clubs per week meets the current level of demand and we are using our reserves to cover this cost.

We realise that this will come as a shock to those of you who come along regularly, and we do feel very sad about this. It costs over £500,000 a year to run Communityworks and it is difficult to get funding to continue and therefore when a group is not well attended, we need to consider whether it can continue.

We have thought long and hard about this decision and if the situation changes in the future, we will look at it again. I hope you understand and that you will continue to support the clubs we deliver.

These are some other sessions that run, with a couple of local options: