How we support children with disabilities

Last year, we continued to provide residential disability services for children and young people, with 10,137 children and young people enjoying one of our Short Breaks.

We spoke to the manager of our West Hyde Short Breaks service, Nicola Gubbins, to tell us more about the service.

West Hyde supports children and young people who have complex disabilities, aged between five and 18.

Nicola currently supports a core team of 16 senior staff, residential workers and assistant residential workers, along with five casual team members to provide over 40,000 hours of support per year to our young people.

We asked her the following questions:

What does a day at West Hyde look like?

"At first, we spend some time preparing for the arrival of the children coming in by doing health and safety checks around the home.

We discuss the children who are coming in and their needs, looking at things such as what food we should be providing and what trips or activities we could offer.

Once the children arrive, there is a hive of activity with people supporting the children, signing in medications, cooking dinner, and overall, just making sure the children are having fun.

In the evening, we do our evening routine for our young people, which could involve providing them with a bath, shower or supporting them with medication, more snacks and activities as well as a bedtime routine."

How do you think West Hyde helps break down the barriers that people with a learning disability face?

"We ensure that we get our children are out and about a lot. We enjoy sharing our knowledge with others to help them understand how to be inclusive when they have people with additional needs attend their restaurant, club, group or shop."

Could you tell us a little bit about FestivAll and the inspiration behind it?

"Fully inclusive trips and activities for our children are very difficult to find. When we discovered that one of our young people loved to attend music festivals, we started looking into how we could take him and some others to a live music festival.

However, we found that nothing within our reach had all the facilities we required to fully enjoy the event from start to finish. We were very disappointed, so we decided to do our own!"

What would you say to someone wanting to work in the sector?

"We have some tough days but more often than not, we have lots of fun and get to meet some wonderful young people and families. It's a role with job satisfaction guaranteed."

Across our services for disabled children, 83% of disabled children and young people have improved social skills, friendships and communication skills. But we can’t keep doing this alone.

Access to our disability services such as West Hyde make a real difference to the children we support.