What HAF Actually Is — And Why It's One of the Most Important Things We Do

If you don't know what HAF stands for, don't worry — most people don't.

But once you understand why we run it, you understand a big part of what Training Cave actually does.

HAF stands for Holiday Activities and Food. School holidays create a gap for a lot of families. No school meals, no structured activity, and for some kids, no safe place to be during the day while parents are working.

Our HAF programme is funded by Kirklees Council, and through that we run free places for kids who qualify for free school meals. But we also run low-cost places alongside those — for families who don't quite hit the free school meal bracket, but are still feeling those same pressures.

That's not a small add-on. It's there on purpose, because eligibility cut-offs don't always line up with actual need. A family can miss the threshold by a small margin and still be feeling exactly the same squeeze over six weeks of school holidays — no free breakfast club, no structured activity, and childcare costs that don't disappear just because the criteria says they should be fine.

So why does this actually matter?

Six weeks off school — or two weeks at Easter or half-term — is a long time for a kid to go without any structured physical activity if nothing's in place.

Routine doesn't stop being good for a kid just because term's ended. Camp gives the day a shape again — arrival, activity, food, pickup — that a lot of households lose as soon as the holidays start.

And to be honest, it's not just about the kids. Holidays are hard for working parents and carers too. A safe, structured place for a week isn't a luxury — it's genuinely useful for the whole family, not just the child. For a parent juggling work with no childcare, knowing their kid is somewhere safe, fed, active and supervised for a week is one less thing to worry about.

There's a social side to it as well. Kids seeing their mates instead of being stuck at home isolated. And it's a properly safe, supervised environment during a period when a lot of kids have less supervision than they'd have in term time — which matters most for the kids who'd otherwise be spending that time unsupervised in the community.

We track this rather than just assume it. Over the summer, we measured HAF participants aged 8–12 across three key fitness indicators over four weeks — and recorded average improvements of 166%, 19% and 71% across those three measures. Those indicators cover things like strength, endurance and general movement capacity — the practical, measurable stuff, not just how a session felt on the day. That's our own tracked data, not an external study, so we're not going to dress it up as more than it is. But it's a big part of why we keep doing this every holiday, not just running it as a box-ticking exercise to fill a week.

This isn't just a local thing

HAF isn't something we invented locally. It exists across the whole country — it came out of a national push during Covid, and Marcus Rashford was one of the loudest voices behind it, drawing on his own experience of relying on free school meals as a kid.

He's since fronted government campaigns encouraging families to actually use HAF. So this isn't some niche thing Training Cave does — it's part of something with national backing and a well-known face behind it.

That national push is exactly what we deliver on the ground, here in Kirklees.

What an actual day looks like

Arrival, food, boxing-based activity, structured downtime, pickup.

And I want to be clear — it's not just boxing. Camp days include multisports too: football, dodgeball, basketball, archery, team games, basic strength and fitness work. I say that because people assume it's boxing all day on the camp, and it isn't. They're here for four hours, so we break that up — partly for variety, partly because different kids respond to different activities, and we'd rather a kid who isn't into boxing still leaves having had a good day.

This isn't childcare with a bit of boxing bolted on. It's the same standards and structure as our usual classes — the same coaches, the same expectations around effort and respect, just condensed into a week instead of stretched across a term.

How far it's come

Our camps started small — the old gym, 6 or 7 kids a day. Last year alone, HAF camps delivered 344 places, part of a wider 69% growth in our community programme delivery compared to the year before.

But the number we're proud of isn't the headcount. It's that a high percentage of those kids come back every single school holiday. That's not just numbers growing — that's kids and families choosing to keep coming back, holiday after holiday, rather than trying us once and not returning.

Why it matters to us as an organisation

HAF isn't just something we deliver — it's genuinely important to us, for a few reasons.

For a lot of kids, it's their first chance to try something they wouldn't normally get the opportunity to try. And some of them like it enough that they come back — not just for the next camp, but as members of Training Cave properly.

It's also a big opportunity for our young leaders. Camp week is where a lot of them get their first taste of volunteering and helping coach — real responsibility, working with younger kids, being part of running a session rather than just attending one. That's genuinely good for their CV. And for some of them, it's the start of a longer path — from member, to volunteer, to coach, and in some cases, to paid staff with us further down the line. It's not unusual for someone currently coaching or working for Training Cave to have started out exactly where the kids on camp are now — as a member who turned up not really knowing what to expect.

It's part of a bigger picture too. Across everything Training Cave delivers — HAF camps, our education programmes in over 20 schools, our SEND classes, and our community outreach work — we generate £3.84 of social value for every £1 invested, and 100% of our partners surveyed said they'd recommend us. HAF camps are one piece of how we get there, but they're also often the first piece — the first time a family, a school, or a young person comes into contact with Training Cave at all.

That's Training Cave's HAF camps. A holiday programme — but for a lot of the kids who come through it, it's the first step into everything else we do at Training Cave.