Latest News

Earlier this week our Chief Executive Officer, Matt Lennard, joined partners from the Barnwood Trust and Gloucestershire County Council to sign a Memorandum of Understanding, setting out our joint commitments for the next two years.

Our partnership aims to enhance inclusive short breaks for families of disabled children and young people in Gloucestershire and will involve all three organisations working together to co-fund short breaks in Gloucester, the North Cotswolds and Tewkesbury.

About the partnership

This new partnership is part of Gloucestershire County Council’s plans to provide families across the county with more choice of inclusive and engaging short breaks for disabled children and young people. It will complement the council’s existing county-wide offer and boost support for families.

Barnwood Trust will also extend to April 2027, its funding for six projects which have been delivering inclusive short breaks across the county since 2023. This is through the Short Breaks Fund, as part of the Trust’s Short Breaks change programme. Barnwood Trust will invest a further £1.2 million in time-limited grant funding for the county-wide projects.

Gloucestershire County Council will use the outcomes of the learning from this partnership to inform the re-procurement in 2026 of short breaks services across the county.

Speaking about this new partnership, Ann James Executive Director of Children’s Services at Gloucestershire County Council, said:

“This is an exciting and unique opportunity for the council to work with Barnwood Trust, children, young people and their families to develop, test and learn from different approaches to delivering short breaks.

The additional funding from Barnwood provides a real boost to the support we can offer families and will help to provide a greater choice of inclusive short breaks designed to meet the needs of children and families in the county.

By working in partnership with children, young people and families, the Barnwood Trust and the Gloucestershire VCSE Alliance, we can use our resources to collectively design and deliver an improved short break offer which will benefit families for years to come.”

Sally Byng, Chief Executive at Barnwood Trust, said:

“This is a great opportunity to enable long-term, sustainable change to the provision of short breaks for disabled children, young people and their families in Gloucestershire.

This provision will meet the needs families have identified and how they, and the service providers, would like to see services delivered. We look forward to being part of the Community of Practice with the short breaks providers and Gloucestershire County Council Children’s Services that will sit alongside this project to enable learning for us all.”

Matt Lennard, Chief Officer at Gloucestershire VCSE Alliance, said:

“This is an exciting opportunity for local VCSE organisations and groups to deliver more support to disabled children and their families. We’re fully behind this ambitious and creative project not

only so VCSE providers can get more involved in short break delivery, but also because we will learn a lot about how to unlock the potential of better connection between statutory bodies, philanthropic money and the skills of local VCSE organisations.”

Further information

Questions and answers about this partnership are available here.

If you would like to find out more about the Short Breaks work please get in touch with:

• Dan Jacques, Social Change Manager at Barnwood Trust at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• Hannah Chesters Senior Commissioning Manager at Gloucestershire County Council at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• Rob Fountain, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Gloucestershire VCSE Alliance at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Click here for Barnwood Trust’s blog ‘Upstream thinking for social change’. Visit our Shortbreaks in Gloucestershire page for more information about this project.