Short Breaks & Respite

What are Short Breaks (sometimes called Respite)?

Kirklees Council provide a range of activities and services to help the whole family to experience a break from the additional demands they experience when caring for someone with a disability, these breaks are often referred to as a short break and come in many different forms.

There is a wide range of social opportunities available to all children and young people in the  borough, including disabled children: these are called Universal Services

A lot of these activities can be found using the Local Offer activities search function

Local Activity search (opens link in new window)

Additionally, Short Break provision is available to children or a young person with a disability aged 0 – 18 years of age.

Some children require an assessment to ensure we are securing good outcomes and families are getting sufficient support for parents caring for a child with a disability. All families with a child with a disability are entitled to an assessment of need. The assessment will consider each case on an individual basis, taking into account all of the family circumstances.

A “Short Break” is to help a family to provide care and give them a break from their caring responsibilities, helping parents catch up with everyday activities, improving their wellbeing and maintaining and developing social networks. It also benefits children by providing them with new interests, relationships, and activities.

Short breaks are different to childcare or the time children spend at school, and there are lots of different types of short breaks which can last anything from an hour to several days. Short break activities can provide a range of opportunities for children with a disability, helping them benefit from new experiences, to have fun, meet new people and make friends, whilst giving parents a much needed break. Short breaks are opportunities for those with special educational needs and disabilities such as learning disabilities, mental health problems and physical disabilities to take part in enjoyable activities with or without parents or carers.

You can find the latest Kirklees Short Break Statement on this page (opens link in same window)

Making Sure Activities and Services meet your needs

Kirklees Council Children with a Disability Service fund a range of community activity and services to meet the needs of local families with disabled children.  To ensure the needs of local families are met, the Children with a Disability Service consider if the activities and service we fund:

• Offers a variety of choice to families.
• Provides opportunities that are empowering for children and young people who
  have a disability.
• Provides opportunities in environments that meet the needs children and young people who have disability.
• Provides opportunities that suit different communication and medical needs.
• Provides activities in a variety of locations and at a variety of times.
• Enables children and young people with a disability to be included where their needs or behaviour may ordinarily have been a barrier.
• Ensures staff are knowledgeable about the needs of children and young people who
  have a disability.
• Provides good, timely and easy read information about the activity

How do we know what parents, carers and young people want?

Kirklees Council’s Children with a Disability Service work hard to adjust and improve services to meet the needs of children and young people in Kirklees.  Consultation is our key focus, we do that by working closely with PCAN, parents, carers, and young people to understand what is working well, what is not working and how things can be improved. The voice of children and young people is extremely important, and we have been able to use our young people’s participation groups to help us understand what is important to them and ensure that we take this into account when developing new services.

We will continue to explore new ways to understand what is important to parents, carers, children, and young people. This will include talking to children, parents and carers in various settings to understand what is important to them.