The Department for Education’s Short Breaks Innovation Fund consists of £30 million designed to support local authorities to establish new Short Breaks services via innovative projects.
This three-year programme (2022-2025) is helping to improve health, education and well-being outcomes for disabled children and young people and children and young people with special educational needs and their families. It aims to address gaps in current Short Breaks services, reduce pressures on High Needs and other budgets, and inform future structural reform and service design.
The first year of funding, which was awarded to seven local authorities, saw positive results for children and their families. The programme's second year saw £10 million awarded across thirteen successful bids from local authorities (and their consortium partners) from across England. The projects support children and young people with a variety of needs and conditions, including learning difficulties and complex needs, to access Short Breaks services closer to home, targeting support where there is unmet need and creating positive opportunities for children and young people.
In our role as Strategic Reform Partner to the Department for Education, the Council for Disabled Children collaborated with local areas from year two of the programme to create a series of learning examples.
These examples set out how local authorities have worked with their partners to plan and implement innovative Short Breaks provision and showcase the difference their projects are making to the lives and outcomes of children and young people.
The learning examples in this series include:
A short breaks provision that is using technology and AI to support disabled children and young people and those with SEN and/or SEMH needs.
A project that is piloting family breaks for children with complex needs, alongside integrating an outcomes-led framework.
Each learning example contains useful reflections on how local authorities went about developing their approach in different contexts, to ensure each intervention was person-centred, prioritised the relationship between the child or young person and the practitioner, and was supported by effective multi-agency collaboration.
The learning examples from year one of the programme can be found here.