The Department for Education and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said the programme would support activities across arts and culture, civic engagement, nature and outdoor activity, life skills including science, technology, engineering and maths, and sport. The departments said activities could include music groups, engineering clubs, debating societies and football clubs, and would be delivered through schools, community programmes, weekend activities and holiday provision:
Table: Official Every Child Can programme facts
| Element | Publicly stated detail |
|---|---|
| Funding | GBP 132.5 million |
| Funding route | Dormant Assets Scheme |
| Delivery settings | Schools, community programmes, weekend activities and holiday provision |
| Activity categories | Arts and culture; civic engagement; nature, outdoor and adventure; life and future skills including STEM; sport and physical activity |
| Accountability | Ofsted to consider enrichment within personal development; school profiles to show local offers |
| Further detail | Application and programme mechanics to be published later |
Source: Department for Education, June 2026.
The policy is being presented as part of a wider attempt to give children more structured offline activity while ministers prepare their response to an online-safety consultation. The consultation, led by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, considered minimum ages for social media, restrictions on design features such as infinite scrolling and autoplay, age assurance, mobile-phone rules in schools and parental support. It ran from 2 March to 26 May 2026, and the government says it will publish its response in summer 2026:
For schools, the immediate policy question is narrower than the online-safety debate: who will deliver the extra clubs, how they will be staffed and whether the money will be distributed through schools or through outside organisations. The government said Every Child Can would be funded through the Dormant Assets Scheme and developed with the National Lottery Community Fund. It also said further details on the remaining funding, programme design and applications would be published "in due course":
That means the announcement is not yet a national operating plan for after-school clubs. Schools Week, which covers English education policy, reported that it was unclear whether any of the GBP 132.5 million would go directly to schools. It also reported that the funding would be routed through the dormant assets system, which uses money from long-unused financial products and is distributed by the National Lottery Community Fund:
The government is pairing the funding with new enrichment benchmarks for schools and colleges. According to the DfE announcement, the benchmarks are meant to give schools and colleges practical tools for offering activities in the five categories, and Ofsted will consider a school's enrichment offer when assessing personal development. Parents will also be able to see a school's offer through new school profiles, according to the same announcement: