Page 1346 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 5 April 2011
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I have already announced my department is commissioning work around the provision of after-school and holiday care for older children who have a disability. This will enable a range of costed options to be identified, along with recommendations on the current location provision.
For the information of members, I can provide the following on the piece of work that is being commissioned: the work will provide information on a range of options and costings for the provision of specialist after-school and vacation care, support for children and young people with complex behaviour associated with autism and other developmental delays and who require significant support to assist them to develop their life skills and social development.
It will bring forward stakeholder feedback, literature, research and evaluation of contemporary best practice and design setting for specialist after-school care and vacation care. It will match current needs to the available resources, the demand for services and the options for delivery of the service, including specialist school environment, costings for each of the options and the risks and benefits of these options. The work will include consultations with the respite stakeholder group, Autism Association, Carers ACT, just to name a few.
The government’s response to the standing committee highlights that the government is on the right track. The implementation plan 2010-14—future directions: towards challenge 2014—outlines the disability policy and service priorities for ACT actions through to 2014. Implementation of the actions will be a combined effort with the assistance of people with a disability, their carers, families and stakeholder service providers. During the development of future directions, we heard that people with a disability and their families want the ACT government to invest in flexible funding models, approaches which provide greater choice and control over the way they obtain their support services and innovative approaches to supported housing options such as the intentional community, which I recently announced.
The ACT government is committed to providing an appropriate level of resources for disability services. In 2005-06, the ACT Treasury and the Department of Disability, Housing and Community Services modelled current and future demand and costs for formal disability services in the ACT. The model identified the requirement of ongoing growth to meet future demand. This reflects the fact that as people with a disability age their support needs generally increase.
The ACT government has significantly increased recurrent funding for disability support since 2002-03, from $41.5 million to $74.1 million in 2010-11. This represents a 79 per cent increase in annual recurrent funding, and resources available for the support for people within the ACT community will continue to be allocated on an equitable and transparent basis in a manner which enables the available resource capacity to reach those most in need.
The standing committee notes the need for robust quality assurance processes for our service providers, and I am pleased to advise that the number of service audits have
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