Ealing Children's Day and Community Short Breaks

Tender description

The London Borough of Ealing currently spends approximately £3.8 million per annum on providing a range non-residential short breaks, domiciliary care and Direct Payments to support children with additional needs and their families. Our priorities include; offering young people and their families a diverse range of support and meaningful short break opportunities, building local capacity and delivering excellent quality services that offer value for money. We know that short breaks benefit both disabled young people and their families/carers. Ealing is planning to procure a Dynamic Purchasing Vehicle for Children’s Day & Community Short Breaks in 2023, with multiple short break settings (draft categories) shown below. Prior to tendering we would like to obtain feedback from the provider market to help inform and shape the commissioning and procurement of service delivery of our short breaks offer for children with additional needs and their families. Day short breaks benefit children and young people by; • Developing and pursuing new and existing interests and hobbies • Making and sustaining a range of positive relationships outside of their families • Taking part in a range of fun and interesting activities and life experiences • Learning new skills that can contribute to help them prepare for adulthood Parents and other Members of the family benefit from: • Ability to have break from their caring role(s) • Having the opportunity to catch up with ‘everyday activities’ (sleep, cleaning, shopping) • Having time to attend to their own physical and psychological wellbeing • Spend time with other children within the family • Maintain and develop social networks The Lots envisaged for these services are as follows. Providers will be able to apply for one or more of these lots Lot 1: Universal and mainstream play, leisure, group activities and outreach services Lot 2: Targeted and enhanced mainstream activities for disabled children and young people, and their siblings Lot 3: Specialist play, leisure and group activities for disabled children and young people with complex health, and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) Lot 4: Specialist residential overnight short breaks Lot 5: Innovation and creative short breaks services It is envisaged that Children’s Day and Community Short Breaks requirements could be called off under single or multiple lots for a single child, or for groups of children. To summarise; • We want to call off services for groups of children in blocks, as well as for individual children • The services called off will be for varying staffing ratios between 5:1 and 1:1 (sometimes within the same contract) • We need a high-quality short breaks service for vulnerable children. • Providers need to be registered with OFSTED. • We are looking for services both with and without accommodation. • For some services we made be able to provide accommodation (for e.g. in schools) Keywords: Short Breaks, Children