You Forget About Phones Children's Summer Camps Facing an Uncertain Future

In a large country school in the Shropshire hills, a group of young boys sporting hand-drawn moustaches are proudly selling wares at a pine cone shop they created that morning.

- Jessica Murray

Another group of children have taken a picnic and gone on an adventure into the woods, while others have gone to the swimming pool or to play ballgames on the front lawn.

This is an Active Training and Education Trust (ATE) residential summer camp – they call them super-weeks – where children from across the country convene for a week of fun, adventure, team building and a dose of silliness.

Experts have said summer camps are at risk of dying out in the UK, with rising costs, lack of funding and a general wariness among parents about what they entail.

The Summer Camps Trust, which campaigns to embed summer camps in Britain and train young leaders, has recently written to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport asking for summer camps to be recognised in its upcoming youth strategy.

"We need a grant if possible, but with or without that, we need officialdom to say this is a good thing for children, some sort of official recognition of what summer camps can do for children," said Chris Green, coordinator of the charity, which estimates that only 2% children aged nine to 15 in Britain currently attend summer camps.

Summer camps are big business in the US, where 26 million children and adults take part in one annually, and are also common in many European countries.