Breakfast Club/After School Club - what does your school do?

[flashingnose]

I'm on a committee which is looking at introducing this at our school. For those of you who use these clubs at your school, what makes them good? What do they do? How much does it cost? Do they do different things for Infants and Juniors (we're a combined school)?

Any information gratefully received .

I'm going to make everyone really jealous by saying that ds' afterschool club costs us a whole £17/week. Ds (and a few others) gets picked up from his own primary school and walked a couple of blocks (about 10 minutes) to the other primary school which hosts the after school club.

Thety have all sorts of games and toys and also have access to an area from more physical activities. They are also given a snack. He has to be picked up by 5.45.

Ds loves it.

Last week he was in their holiday club all week. they had excursions every day: trips to locla parks (2 days), trip to the People's Palace (a museum), trip to Loch Lomond shores and a trip to the cinema (saw Wallace & Grommit). Tickets, trains and buses were all included - the only thing we had to provide was a packed lunch.

All this for the princely sum of £30!!!!

Yesterday was an Inservice training day and they took him 10 Pin Bowling (not sure how much that will cost us - supect it will be £5 - but then we will only have 4 days of AfterSchool to pay for this week).

I suspect (know) it is heavily subsidised by the City Council (at last, we are getting something back for the £2,600 we pay per year in Council Tax!)

Flashingnose - maybe your council could alos advise you?

Wow, thanks again for these comments - they're all so useful. Council suggestion is a very good idea.

The big thing for me when my son used the on-site after school club was the fact that the people running it were very keen that it should be a "home from home" and not a homework club, or somewhere that any formal learning was done (which some parents wanted). There was lots of choice of activities; if the weather was good the kids could use the playground (supervised of course) and there was a comfy corner where children could just chill out. My son loved it from reception until about year 4 when he got a bit fed up with it because most of the kids by then were younger than himself. I think it's a good way for the different ages to mix though.

Flashingnose CAT me and we'll talk - what do you want to know?