Is your holiday club team ready for the Easter rush?

Schools are breaking up, booking systems are pinging, and across the country holiday clubs are about to absorb a couple of weeks’ worth of school-age energy. If you run wraparound or holiday provision, this is your busiest fortnight since Christmas. It’s also, quietly, your riskiest.

Here’s why. Holiday clubs staff up quickly, and the people they staff up with often come from outside early years and education altogether: students home for the holidays, sports coaches, returners picking up seasonal work. Great people, lots of energy, and in many cases not a single hour of formal training in the rules that apply to school-age childcare. That’s the gap this post is about.

The rules don’t take the holidays off

Wraparound and holiday care sits in a corner of childcare regulation that surprisingly few people understand well, including some who work in it. Which provision needs to be registered and on what basis, what the ratio expectations look like for school-age children, and where your duties actually come from. Staff don’t need to be regulation experts, but the person leading each session needs more than a vague sense that “someone at head office sorts that”.

Safeguarding is the sharper edge of the same point. School-age children bring different safeguarding questions than nursery children: friendship fallouts that tip into something worse, what an eight-year-old lets slip about home while queuing for snack, older children arriving and leaving with varying degrees of independence. A seasonal team member who has never been taught how to recognise a concern or who to pass it to is a weak link you can’t afford in week one.

Play, not school (and not childcare-lite either)

The other thing that separates a good holiday club from a mediocre one has nothing to do with compliance. Children have just finished a term. The last thing they want is a day that feels like more school, with worksheets rebranded as activities. The best clubs run on a playwork-inspired approach: children choose, adults enable, and the timetable serves the play rather than the other way round.

That’s harder than it sounds with a mixed-age group. A room containing reception children and ten-year-olds is a genuine skill test: the younger ones need warmth and structure, the older ones need trust and something worth turning up for, and everyone needs to feel the club belongs to them. Behaviour tends to look after itself when children feel that sense of belonging; it falls apart when they’re bored. Our Wraparound and Holiday Club Essentials course was built exactly for this mix of people and questions, covering registration and ratios, safeguarding school-age children, the play-first approach and managing mixed-age groups, in a format seasonal staff can complete before their first shift.

Train them before Monday, not after half term

We hear this from managers a lot: the intention was always to train the holiday team, and then the holidays arrived first. The beauty of online training for seasonal staff is that it fits into the scramble. Someone signed up on Thursday can have completed the essentials, certificate and all, before the children arrive on Monday morning.

It also does something for your regular team. When the seasonal staff arrive knowing the basics, your experienced people spend the week leading sessions instead of firefighting induction questions. Everyone has a better fortnight, including the children.

Keep the certificates on file, too. If a question is ever asked, whether by a parent, an inspector or your own registration body, being able to show that every member of the Easter team completed their training before their first session is exactly the evidence you want to have to hand.

The Easter rush rewards the clubs that prepared. Sort the training now, and the only chaos you deal with next week will be the good kind: paint, den-building and someone’s trainers full of sand.