Education

Summer camps for all: no mobiles, no selfies – just the chance to be children | Hazel Davis


I’m in an activity centre near the Worcestershire town of Bewdley, watching a game of “giants and pixies” and picking dried banana out of my hair after a “spa session” this morning, where I was treated to a hand massage and a homemade face mask. This is not your average children’s camp. Nobody is abseiling or caving and there has only been one woodcraft session so far.

“Shall we go to the den and play werewolves?” shouts Gabe, an assistant with a broad grin, described by 11-year-old Alistair as “the very best camp monitor we could have got”.

The camp is run by Active Training and Education Trust (ATE), a not-for-profit organisation established in 1996, which provides residential holidays – known as “superweeks” – to school-age children throughout England. About 400 children a year attend superweeks at six centres in Shropshire, Worcestershire, Stroud and Derbyshire.

Alistair is here because his school nominated him as someone who might benefit from a seven-day residential. ATE works with schools and special educational needs coordinator teachers to target children they know will benefit from the experience. His place was subsidised by ATE, with his parents and school footing a nominal £35 fee. Alistair says, “It’s a really good way to make new friends and try new things. I just love it.”

ATE’s programmes director, Liz Macartney, says the nominal fee is important. “It ensures they actually turn up but is small enough so that many people can afford it,” she explains.

Non-subsidised places cost £450 a week, including travel from 17 towns and cities either by coach or train. “We know that £450 is not money you find down the back of the sofa but at the same time it’s comparable with childcare costs,” says Macartney.

In 2009, the organisation launched an “adventure appeal” to subsidise low-income families, who make up a third of the programme’s attendees. Since then, as many as 974 children (including this year’s cohort) have benefited from the appeal, which has raised more than £360,000. ATE also runs a scheme, sponsored by former students and supporters, that means if a family or school can pay half the fee then the trust will match it. The camps’ ethos is to be accessible to all children, whether financially privileged, at-risk or with special educational needs. “We’re not about siloing poor kids away,” says Macartney. ATE’s mission statement says: “When children are surrounded by the pressures of a hectic world, ATE believes that a period ‘away from it all’, doing simple, fun activities in a tucked away, countryside setting with others from all over Britain and beyond can be of immense value.”

One notable thing about the week I’m on is that nobody’s cool – and I mean that with the greatest respect. There are no phones, no selfies, no makeup, Emma Williams explains. She is one of the camp “monitors”, or helpers – volunteers who have gone through a stringent training process and are often former attendees. She says: “It’s one of the reasons we don’t play things like football or rounders. None of the kids knows the games so everyone has a fair crack.” Instead, most games are made up by volunteers or tried and tested over the years and learned on training courses.

There is also no timetable, something that might strike fear into the heart of a helicopter parent. “We decide what we’re going to do that morning, depending on mood, how the group’s feeling and what’s happened before,” says Macartney.

Children playing outdoors



Most games are made up by volunteers or tried and tested over the years and learned on training courses. Photograph: Active Training and Education Trust

That’s not to say there isn’t any organisation. “There’s just a lot of flexibility, which is crucial to what we do.” Similarly, every single activity is something the children can do at home. There is no fancy kit, no special outfits or equipment. Games range from wearing your pants on your head at dinner through making a bracelet out of safety pins to welly wanging (throwing) outside – and much more in between.

Clare Wood, from Chesterfield, is 13. She’s on her 19th superweek, first coming when she was seven. Both older sisters are monitors. “I love meeting new people and making friends. I’ve got friends that I’ve met on previous weeks. It’s not about the individual things we do, it’s about the whole feeling. I just love it.”

Lewis Davis, 12, from London, first came two years ago at the suggestion of his school. He has now been on five camps, funded by his local authority’s children’s services after the school noticed the positive impact it was having. “It was the first time I’d spent a week away from my parents and I was a bit scared, but I loved it,” he says. “Each camp is different because there are different people and I do things like chocolate making and I make new friends.”

Despite the boost to confidence, social skills, wellbeing and happiness that parents and teachers say is evident after children have attended a summer camp, fewer than 2% of children in the UK go to one each year, compared with nearly 10% in the US.

Chris Green is coordinator of the Summer Camps Trust, a recently established charity (of which ATE is a member), which wants 1 million children participating in summer camps in Britain by 2040. “A week or so a year in a well-run residential camp, right away from phones, laptops and the pressures of the outside world, with the opportunity to play and share a laugh with others their own age from all over Britain, gives children a taste of what life in a happy community can be like,” he says. “Most children in the US, Canada, France and Italy think of their annual week at camp as the best fun of the year.”

Green adds: “By giving children back some ‘real childhood’, so they spend more time playing in green fields, listening to stories and exercising their imagination, and less time posting messages on social media or sweating over quadratic equations, we might see fewer reports and articles on how miserable our children are.” He would even like a week on a summer camp to be compulsory in the UK to improve children’s mental health. In the meantime, the trust will be promoting a programme to try out summer camps in August at a low cost, which aims to recruit 500 nine- to 15-year-olds who have never yet tried a residential camp.

“Short periods spent in truly happy and relaxed communities can do wonders for young people’s personal development,” says Green. “There has never been a time in our history when British children needed it more.”

To book or donate to an ATE superweek visit: superweeks.co.uk/adventure-appeal/ More details of the Summer Camps Trust “try out” programme at summercampstrust.org/bookings/



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