Disabled facilities grant help - loft extension

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Hello

i posted on the SEN board about this a while ago but didn’t get many responses.

does anyone have experience of accessing the disabled facilities grant for their child.

We live in a 2 bedroom house and have 2 boys aged 4 and 6.

Our 6 year old has SEN and attends a specialist school and is non verbal with lots of behavioural difficulties.

The boys have shared a room but this has now become untenable. We’ve had to move the 4 year old in with us as his brother was hurting him and waking him up at all hours.

This has all been so stressful for our family and none of us is getting much sleep.

Our downstairs is open plan so we can’t convert the dining room to a bedroom or something.

We own our house and have looked into moving and simply can’t afford it as I’ve had to give up my better paid job as I couldn’t make it work around looking after my child with SEN as his school has no wraparound care. I do shifts at the pub in the evenings and weekends.

Would the disabled facilities grant help us with a loft conversion? Our social worker has referred us to occupational therapy for an assessment but I don’t understand how all this works.

Thank you

Thank you for replying - this is good to be aware of

There are charities who can fund specialist beds. Newlife offer emergency loans.

If you are in England, specialist beds can be funded. Your OT might say they don’t locally, but specialist beds can be funded, so you can complain.

Interesting as we were told in no uncertain terms that our local authority do not fund beds under any circumstances.

I will look into the charity thank you

You really need the OT assessment. They may also be able to provide evidence that your son needs a specialist bed too.

Our son became disabled suddenly after complications from an illness last year, OT assessed our previous property and deemed it unsuitable for our son. Thanks to their help, we were rehomed within a month into an adapted council property and also provided with several specialist equipment to help with our son at home including a specialist bed with specialist mattress.

Fingers crossed for you.

Beds aren’t normally funded via DFGs. They are provided via other routes.

LAs have the discretion to fund more than £30k, especially for children. They don’t like to, but they have more responsibilities towards children. Although they often put a charge on the house for so many years.

I'm not saying it's fair. I'm just talking from the perspective of someone who tried to do the same

Thanks.

Good to be aware of.

Hopefully I can talk to the occupational therapist about this

For those asking here is a very similar floor plan but the second bedroom is a bit smaller

I really don’t think we can partition off the downstairs as it would leave so little living space and our son loves to run around downstairs

And we’re not allowed to convert the car port - it’s a new build and not allowed

I’m sure someone can do the math about whether splitting the biggest bedroom is possible.

Apparently legally bedrooms need to be no less than 4.64m2 for a child under 10 and no less than 6.51 m2 for a child over 10

i have no idea how to do that calculation though.

Hopefully you will get the DFG but if not have you considered giving up your bedroom for one of your sons and having a sofa bed downstairs? I know it is far from ideal but might be the only practical solution for now. You could get some really good storage so that all your stuff would remain in the bedroom but hidden away.

Or perhaps you could split the biggest room into two. I’m guessing you can’t put in another window so technically the windowless room couldn’t be classified as a bedroom but you may be able to install a sun tunnel through the loft into the room so at least it would have natural light.