Early Support
Is part of the wider Aiming High for Disabled Children programme which is transforming services for disabled children across England.
Who is Early Support for?
Early Support is for families with disabled children under five and anyone who regularly works with them. There is a wide range of people using Early Support, including:
- Families with young babies leaving hospital with medical and support needs.
- Older children where the need for extra help becomes clear only in the second or third year of life.
- Children who have obvious and multi significant factors affecting development and learning.
- Children with less obvious difficulties.
What does Early Support offer?
Children with disabilities are a diverse group with changing needs. It is essential that these children have the same opportunities as other children – to have the choices and opportunities that we aspire to for all our young people. And it’s vital that they get that support as early as possible – early intervention not only impacts positively in terms of promoting development, it also challenges any possibility of early decline or regression among children with disabilities.
Parents have consistently reported a lack of co-ordination in services, where separate systems operating in the statutory agencies positively stand in the way of parents receiving a joined up service. Early Support aims to ensure that services are better coordinated, with a single point of contact, working in a family and child focused way, in partnership with parents and carers.
Early Support is about getting everyone, families and professionals’, working effectively together at the earliest opportunity. Early Support provides families, practitioners and key workers with information, guidance and resources to ensure the best support for disabled children.
How will Early Support help in the better delivery of services?
Early Support has developed a range of resources and training that are aimed at bringing service providers together to determine what a child’s and family’s needs are and put the parent at the centre of the planning process. The materials are not, however, the intervention.
What are the Early Support materials and resources?
The Early Support materials and resources are intended for anyone who works with families as well as for parents and carers of young children with disabilities. They are designed to keep families at the centre of discussions and decision making about their child. They have been developed to be used flexibly; helping both the practitioners and families to co-ordinate service provision and navigate the system in a way that suits them. The materials and resources include:
- Family Pack (including the family file and range of background information booklets)
- Range of information for parents booklets
- Multiagency planning tool
- Developmental journals
- Training courses.
One of the main features of the Family file is the Family Service Plan, which supports joint discussion between the parent and the professional about what services the family and child needs and how the services that are available locally will respond. It offers a real chance at the very beginning of better coordination of services.
The family pack also brings together in one pack all the information the family needs about services, financial help and other basic information that families have struggled to get together in the past.
Information for parents’ booklets
This set of booklets, each describing either a particular condition or a range of factors affecting young children’s development.
Developmental journals
This set of four journals helps families track record and celebrate their child’s progress through the early years. They support early intervention by improving everyone understands of the developmental processes involved and provide a shared basis for discussion as a child grows and changes. There is a generic journal for children who have additional needs or undiagnosed conditions; one for babies and children with visual impairments: one for children with Down Syndrome and a Monitoring protocol for deaf babies and children.
The Early Support multiagency planning tool
This a resource that professionals can use to assess how well they deliver services to families and how well they work with families in planning services to support them and to plan effective implementation of Early Support principles and materials.
There are seven different Early Support training courses:
- Parents’ workshops
- Working in Partnership through Early Support (accredited)
- Working in Partnership through Early Support
- Using the Early Support multiagency planning tool - This one-day course aims to ensure that practitioners, managers and parents/carers understand the purpose of the Early Support multiagency improvement tool – so they can see how useful it can be when planning for and evaluating improvement in outcomes for families
- Using the Early Support monitoring protocol/ developmental journals
- Support children with additional needs and with disabilities.
Early Support continues to develop in Essex. Please talk to those who are supporting you.