Short Break Stories

CLASP

A story by Cornerstone

We delivered a monthly Youth Club, a weekly sports club (term time), the Zone Club in partnership with Active Schools, one-to-one support and a monthly Parent Forum.

CLASP Cornerstone supports children with disabilities and their parents/carers in Argyll and Bute. The service supports 36 children between the ages of 5-19 through a variety of services.

 

What CLASP did

This year CLASP welcomed 2 new members to the team to cope with the increased number of children and carers accessing our support. The new staff have undertaken all necessary training for the posts. We advertised the posts through the Cornerstone Website and local newspapers and carried out interviews in order to find the strongest applicants to join our growing team.

Better Breaks funding programme has allowed CLASP to work in partnership with Active Schools to provide a Zone Club, a sports after school club suitable for children with additional support needs. The number has increased each year and offers the parents weekly respite for an hour and a half. Each week the children enjoy a different activity, have fun and get a bit of exercise.

The children also have access to a Youth Club monthly. This has been very popular with our older children/young adults in our service. This is very much lead by the children and the staff are there to help facilitate this. The Club runs for 1.5 hours every month. The club allows parents time in the evening to socialise, go to a fitness class or simply enjoy a bit of 'me time'..

Cornerstone, and our CLASP service in particular, have an established presence in Argyll and Bute. We have good relations with the local authority in particular social work, who are very familiar with the various elements of CLASP available to children with disabilities and their families/carers. Further, our Parent Monthly Forum network is very strong. In the past year we have been able to provide childcare during these meeting to enable more parents and carers to participate. Some children have personal care, mobility or behavioural needs that require 1:1 staffing.

During school holidays, many families/carers have to go to work as normal. During monthly Saturdays families and carers enjoy rare opportunities to have a break from their caring responsibilities, they maybe go for lunch with their partner, spend focused time with their other children, visit friends, or cuddle up with a good book for a couple of hours.

At present we support a young boy with Autism, poor leg muscle control and is non verbal. He has just started school this year and now he is able to access both the Youth Club and the Zone Club provided by CLASP. He uses a bespoke Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) system to communicate his needs and wants.

Through this communication system, we learned about his interest in horses. Working in partnership with a local riding school we arranged for riding lessons. CLASP staff taught the teacher at the stables how to use the PECS to make the experience more suitable for the child. This is a brilliant opportunity for him because his limited leg strength makes other sports difficult for him to take part.

The boy loved the lessons, finds them very therapeutic and has developed his on way of communicating with his horse, “Spider”. With regular visits he is gradually becoming more verbal, using words to describe the horse and its needs. These opportunities are priceless.

We currently support a boy of 11 who has Downs Syndrome and very challenging behaviours which require 24 hour care. With the funds from Better Breaks we were able to provide support to this family through Zone Club, Youth Club and one to one support.

These breaks enable the family to spend dedicated time with their other children, go out for a meal and do everyday activities such as washing, shopping, dentist appointments, or meeting up with friends. Knowing that their son is being supported and given the opportunity to try something new and socialise with peers is invaluable to the family.
This year the CLASP Team Leader has become involved with the local “GIRFEC” network involving schools, social workers and other health and social care agencies. This has given CLASP the opportunity to be involved in all stages of the planning and development of local services, share best practices, and learn from other agencies in order to provide high quality, personalised service as a community.

What Cornerstone has learned

The Better Break funding programme has been essential to our organisation. It has enabled CLASP to continue to provide a high level of Service within Argyll and Bute community and provide the life line to families. It has also highlighted that we are now at a point to develop our ideas and expand.

CLASP has learned that we must operate within budget constraints. We must maintain a balance between doing all that we can to support the children and their parents/carers and operating the service responsibly while making it sustainable. This has also highlighted the need to seek funding from more than one organisation in order to continue to develop our service. As this has currently been restricted due to funds available.

In the past year we have learned different methods of involving the children in the planning and development of the service. Many of the children have communication difficulties so creativity and personalisation is essential!

Enabling the children to try new activities involves risk assessment and for some children or for certain activities, additional staffing is required. With safety being paramount we’ve learned to do a lot of careful planning to ensure we are offering the activities the children are interested in and keeping the service within budget.

We have held some fund raising events locally from Bingo Nights to Fashion shows and learned how responsive the public is to supporting CLASP.
Top tips Cornerstone's top tips for an organisation that wants to run a similar project
Tip 1:
Be receptive to change and involve everyone in the planning and development process.
Tip 2:
Establish and maintain a good working relationship with all agencies involved in the project.
Tip 3:
Good communication is the key to progressions that serve the interests of the children and their parents/carers.