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Play and Youth Services

The Westminster Society believes that play is an essential part of every child's life and is vital to their social, emotional, educational and healthy development.

The Society's Play and Youth Services currently offer a range of play and youth opportunities. These aim to offer children and young people with disabilities access to experiences and friendships that help them develop their full potential as individuals. We also ensure that we provide the highest quality care and personal support to meet individuals needs. We aim to support families by providing informal respite care while their children are joining in our activities. Delivery of our play and youth opportunities takes place during holiday periods, after school and on Saturdays.

Current Activities

Play Schemes are our main play provision, with social services being the funder and referring agency. The schemes have focused on providing a service for children and young people with severe, profound and complex disabilities or where the impact of disability within the family has been quite severe. As a result our services do include children with a broad range of disabilities, a spectrum of communication disorders, and an increasing group with complex physical needs.

The majority of the children require individual one to one support or high staff ratios of support between 2:1 or 3:1. In some exceptional cases we provide staff support of two workers for one child / young person.  We currently support 41 children and young people with disabilities and 8 siblings aged between 5 to 16 years. This includes;

• 16 children on the autistic spectrum
• 14 with general learning disability
• 11 children with complex physical, learning and sensory disabilities

Specific Services

The specific services funded within Play and Youth Service are as follows;

1. The Play and Leisure Inclusion Project funded by Childrens Fund / Early Years Childcare Development Partnership until March 2006. The aim of this project is to:

Offer advice, information, training and guidance to encourage the provision of high quality inclusive services. It has a specific role to support mainstream providers to become inclusive.

Represent the interests of inclusion on strategic bodies and to facilitate links between organisations

Take a lead on consultation and involvement of children with disabilities and their families

This project is funded to employ a full time Play Inclusion Worker and is for children aged between 5 - 14 years and providers working with that age group.

2. Holiday Play Schemes funded by Children and Families Disability Social Work Team based on an annual Service Level Agreement. Under this Agreement we provide 50 days per year of play provision (including two training days) covering the school holiday periods apart from Christmas.

There are 35 children (aged between 5 - 16 years) with severe learning and complex needs currently receiving this service. This is the maximum number at any one time. The children receive on average between 19 - 24 days of holiday play scheme provision each year (on average 2 - 3 days per week).

Play schemes are based and organized at Rainbow, but actual play activities take place using a wider range of community based resources, including Rainbow (when the Early Years Service is not in operation), the Croxley Project and venues both inside and outside Westminster.

12 hourly paid play workers are employed for each day of play scheme.

3. Out of School Inclusive Play funded by Better Play until June 2005. Remit of this project is to support children (aged 5 - 14 years) with disabilities to participate in their local mainstream play. The project funds a specialist peripatetic play work team whose aim is to demonstrate ways of supporting and including disabled children. The project also provides advice, information and training about best practice in meeting the specific needs of the children being supported. The overall aim is that the children with disabilities will continue to be included in the mainstream provision at the end of the project.

Currently, 6 children are being supported in to two mainstream play centres on a one to one basis. It is planned that this will shortly expand to include two additional centres and 4 -6 additional children.

Currently 4 hourly paid sessional play workers are part of the specialist peripatetic team.

4. Saturday Activities funded by the John Lyons Charitable Trust.

This is a three year term time Saturday Project (April 2005 to March 2008) providing youth activities on two Saturdays per month for young people with disabilities aged 13 plus. The aim of the project is to provide a range of activities / opportunities out in the wider community that reflect the interests of the young people and meets their needs.

The project is open to the young people who are play scheme users (currently 10 young people) and will provide places for between 4 - 8 young people per session depending on needs, activities and environments. It will also focus on supporting the young people and their families in to accessing other youth based services, as and when appropriate.

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