9 - Special educational needs and disabilities

Did you offer provision for children with Special Educational Needs & Disabilities? If yes then can you share examples

Throughout the year, a total of 413 Children who benefited from the HAF scheme were recorded as having SEND. However, providers feed back that this number is low. Increasing SEND HAD provision is an ambition for Staffordshire.

We developed the HAF Light offer as a number of SEND specialist providers advised that delivering for 4 hours per day 4 days a week was too intensive and any HAF offer at that level reduced the delivery of other specialist SEND holiday clubs. HAF Light allows for a minimum of 2 hours per week for a minimum of 2 days per week for specialist providers only. This has resulted in the us providing four specialists SEND HAF clubs across the County. This includes Gartmore Riding School, Caudwell Children, Let Us Play and Liberty Jamboree.

These providers can provide 121 support, specialist feeding, and personal care as required. A parent attending a Caudwell Children HAF club explained that this club had enabled her child to develop a proper friendship like her siblings. At the HAF club, her daughter had made friends with another child with similar needs, and they spent time texting each other, had play dates and even (as both sets of parents /carers were confident in managing special needs children) had their first sleep overs together. As the families are from different parts of the County, their children would never have met without the HAF provision. Another parent has fed back, leaving her child at Caudwell, and seeing how settled they were, had given her the most space and time to herself without having to worry, and she had enjoyed her first stress free visit to a coffee shop in a long time.