• About Families with Disabled Children
• Every Disabled Child Matters

Good News for Families

Thanks to concerted lobbying by the Every Disabled Child Matters Campaign - including Contact a Family - Ed Balls MP, Economic Secretary and Lord Adonis, SEN and Disability Minister within Department for Educational Skills have recently announced the most substantial funding package ever for families with disabled children living in England.

From 2008 to 2011, £340m will be invested in services for disabled children, with the lion's share, £280m, being spent on short breaks for families who have children with severe disabilities.

The package will also include:

• £35m for accessible childcare (to be piloted in 10 Local Authorities);
• £19m to ease transition from child to adult services;
• £5m to involve parents in shaping local services.

The measures were announced as part of the Treasury's Aiming High for Disabled Children report, which followed a ground-breaking review of services and took heart-rending evidence from parents, as well as talking to professionals.

"As founder members of the Every Disabled Child Matters campaign, we've lobbied long and hard for this funding, so it's very good news," said Contact a Family Chief Executive Francine Bates. "The pot's large enough to begin a transformation of families' lives - but now the challenge is to make sure the money is spent where it is most needed in consultation with parents, disabled children and young people."

You can read more about the Aiming Higher for Disabled Children work here.

About Families with Disabled Children

It is estimated that there are 770,000 disabled children under the age of 16 in the UK. The vast majority are cared for at home by family with little or no outside support. Contact a Family campaigns for better services for disabled children in each of the nations of the UK and is widely recognised in government, and increasingly in the media, as a powerful and effective voice for parents.

Every year Contact a Family provides advice and support to over 20,000 families with disabled children and many thousands more through a large network of parent support groups. Through our work with families we hear about the issues families face on a day to day basis:

• More than half of families are living in, or at the margins of, poverty and they are more likely to be in debt;
• Childcare is significantly more expensive and fewer mums of disabled children are able to work;
• The pressures of caring for a disabled child can cause relationship problems;
• Disabled children are 13 times more likely to be excluded from school.

Knowing what families face every day helps inform our campaigns and policy work, more recently channelled through the Every Disabled Child Matters campaign, of which Contact a Family is a leading partner.

Every Disabled Child Matters

Contact a Family urges all our supporters to sign up to support the Every Disabled Child Matters campaign (EDCM)

Contact a Family has been supporting EDCM since it launched in September 2006. Like EDCM, we want all disabled children and their families to have the right to the services and support they need to live ordinary lives.

28,000 people, including disabled children and young people, parents, professionals, disabled adults, and others working in the field, have already signed up to support the campaign. But the campaign needs this level of support to keep growing.

Campaigning by EDCM, its partners and individual supporters has already put enough pressure on government to release an additional £430million for services for disabled children and their families, alongside a programme of change that will start to transform lives.

We need even more people to sign up to EDCM, to keep the pressure on government to deliver and go further.

Please sign up using the form on the EDCM website now, Web: http://www.edcm.org.uk and ask everyone you know to do the same. If you keep the box on the sign-up form ticked, EDCM will send you updates about what you can do to help make change happen.