School Holiday Support Program Bulletin

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New program

The Disability Services Commission has developed a new program to support families.The School Holiday Support Program aims to provide flexible and innovative school holiday support to people with disabilities and their families.

The School Holiday Support Program will support a broad range of holiday options including sporting and recreational activities and holiday camps. The activities funded through this program will be focussed on providing opportunities for young people with disabilities to access a range of community-based activities with people of similar age or with similar interests, and on building and enhancing family wellbeing and strengthening
family relationships.

The School Holiday Support Program complements the existing range of Commission-funded family support programs, including the various forms
of respite.

Who is the program for?

The School Holiday Support Program is for school age children with disabilities who meet the Commission’s eligibility criteria for specialist disability services, and who are living with families.

The School Holiday Support Program will also support the following groups where there is a family member who is eligible for specialist disability services:

school age siblings;

school age carers; and

families with school age children (supporting family members to do activities together).

What does the program hope to achieve?

The objectives of the School Holiday Support Program are to:

provide flexible and innovative support options that are strengths-based and individually tailored to meet the needs of a person with a disability and their family/carer;

strengthen family/carer capacity and to promote and maintain a positive home environment;

enable people with disabilities to participate in community life in ways that are appropriate for the life course of each person, reflect their cultural identity, and are valued by the person, their family/carer and the community; and

enable people with disabilities and their families/carers to develop and maintain relationships, community connections and support networks.

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Funding

The opportunity will exist for organisations, including those not currently funded by the Commission to apply for up to three years funding. Organisations can apply in their own right or can partner with other organisations to provide a range of supports which are flexible, inclusive and responsive to the needs of people with disabilities, their families and carers.

Proposals that have a focus on supporting children and young people with very high support needs will be viewed favourably.

Where funding proposals include group activities for children and young people with disabilities, preference will be given to those proposals which enable participants to interact with their peers (with and without disabilities) in a range of community-based activities. This would include (but not be limited to) programs which build on or partner with existing community school holiday programs.

Advertising of the Request for Proposal is planned for late November 2009 with applications closing lateFebruary 2010 andsuccessful tenders being awarded in April/May 2010. The school holiday supports offered by organisations under the new programare to commence from the July 2010 school holidays.

It is anticipated that organisations will apply for varying amounts of funding up to a maximum of $30,000 per annum. Applications for larger funding amounts

will be considered where evidence supports the request.

The School Holiday Support Program funding includes the capacity for organisations to provide brokerage funding to families/carers to purchase supports in line with the program’s objectives.

Further information

Further information on the new School Holiday Support Program can be obtained fromthe Manager of the Commission’s Community Support Program, Ms Tracy Foulds: Telephone: (08) 9426 9217; toll free: 1800 998 214; TTY (08)94269315; or email:

As updated information on the new program becomes available, it will be placed on the Commission’s website:

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