Decision – Further Allocation of Higher Needs Capital Allocation

To approve an
additional £100,000 bringing the total allocation to
£300,000 from the Local Authority’s Higher Needs
Provision Capital Allocation (HNPCA) to facilitate the
relocation of the Family Time Service to
Fairwinds, Occombe, Paignton.

The Family Time
Service provides a range of services in response to the assessed
needs of Children and Families including family assessments and
supervised contacts as part of the Council’s statutory
Corporate Parenting role.

It was displaced from
its original home at The Ark in Brixham in July 2025 to enable the
expansion of Mayfield Schools Chestnut Provision.  Whilst it is currently being delivered from
temporary settings this is not financially viable in the long term
and impacts on service delivery and staffing through the spreading
of resources across sites.

There is currently an
available budget of £2.1m in the HNPCA, and it is already
included within the Children’s Capital Programme with
Director of Children’s Services having delegated powers to
approve expenditure in line with the Department for Education (DfE)
criteria and with local SEND strategies.

Fairwinds is a Council
Asset that will become vacant in August 2026.  After a site appraisal of available Council sites
including ZigZags, the Monastery, Great
Parks and the Polsham centre; it has
concluded that the most viable and suitable location is Fairwinds
and the proposal is to relocate the Service to this asset and for
it to become their permanent base.

This decision will
come into force immediately.

The original decision
was taken by the Director of Children’s Services, in consultation
with Strategic Head of Education and SEND and Head of Education, on
28 April 2026. 

Approval is now
required to allocate a further £100,000 to the Relocation of
Family Time to Fairwinds.