Short Breaks

What are short breaks?

A short break is a good quality, fun, positive activity that children or young people with disabilities can attend, where they can do things they enjoy, have new experiences and develop new skills. It helps provide positive outcomes for the child or young person and prepares them for life as an adult, increasing their independence. Short breaks should:

• Give the child or young person a valuable and enjoyable experience away from daily life, which contributes to their personal, social and life skills development
• Give the parent/carer a valuable break and allow them to rest, take up other interests or spend time with their other children.

These breaks can take the form of:

• Leisure activities outside of the home
• Daytime care in the home or elsewhere
• Overnight care in the home or elsewhere
• Specialist activities during the evenings, weekends and school holidays.

Our vision for short breaks

Slough Children’s Services Trust has a vision for our Short Break Service for children and young people with learning difficulties and disabilities and this is:

“To enable as many children and young people as possible with disabilities to remain living at home with support from community services to lead normal family lives and have access to universal settings or more specialist local services in accordance with their wishes.”

We are therefore committed to:

• Ensuring that we listen to all children and young people with disabilities, act on their views and provide them with choices wherever possible
• Ensuring that all disabled children and their families are supported to take part in and enjoy local community life and wherever possible use local childcare facilities, leisure and recreational activities
• Ensuring that parents/carers are supported to become equal partners in making decisions about service development and priorities to enable us to work together to improve our services
• Ensuring we provide you with useful information when you need it.

How do I find out about Short Breaks?

There are currently various ways to find out about short breaks:

• We will continue to advertise short breaks as widely as possible
• We will ensure that the Slough Local Offer holds the relevant information about short breaks and childcare. This can be accessed through the Slough Family Services website.

As children and young people with a disability have varying needs and diverse family settings, we set out to provide a wide range of short break provision to meet those needs. We have looked at our information about the number of children with disabilities living in Slough and we have listened to what parents/carers, young people, the voluntary sector and other professionals have told us about what short break children want and families need.