Case Study: Short breaks for disabled children
Along with interested stakeholders and service providers, children and young people and parents and carers of disabled children and young people were asked to help the Council to decide how to spend just over £1m over the next 2 years on improving short breaks for their children.
Short breaks are periods of temporary independence for disabled children and young people and can be in the form of overnight breaks, breaks during the day or breaks in community such as joining in activities of their choice. Investment for increasing and transforming short break services comes from the Aiming High for Disabled Children review by the Department of Health and the Department for Children, Schools and Families. The Council intends to expand the types of short breaks available, improve access to services, provide high quality breaks, and meet the needs of those children who might be missing out due to a lack of suitable provision at present.
From the initiation of the short breaks development year, members of the Parent Carers Council were key partners in developing short breaks services by their involvement in the short breaks steering group (a multi agency group to drive forward the transformation of short breaks services).
On behalf of the steering group a series of consultation exercises was carried out including a workshop with parents and carers held at Shrewsbury football club. Parents identified the children in need of short break services, barriers to accessing services and considered how existing services could be enhanced, developed and monitored. Through this workshop the following outcome for their children was identified and has been adopted as the vision statement to underpin the development of short break services in Shropshire:
“Children will independently and confidently participate in their local community resources skilfully supported by competent adults who can meet their needs”
We have made a start in commissioning short breaks services and in consideration of disabled parents’ expressed wishes to access playschemes during school holidays (other than the summer), we are commissioning a pilot playscheme during the Easter holiday next year which has been opened up to a limited number of disabled children from mainstream schools. We are also piloting an inclusion service that will offer time limited support to disabled children and young people to access mainstream services with a view to them being able to access those activities independently dependent upon the level of need. Members of the PACC contributed to procuring the provider delivering these services by being members of tender evaluation panels; assessing tender submissions and interviewing prospective providers.
