Early Support is a programme for families with babies or children under five with additional support needs associated with disability or emerging special educational need. It’s designed to help families access better co-ordinated services for their children, and is particularly relevant where families are in contact with lots of different people.

Yes. Early Support is the central Government mechanism for achieving better co-ordinated, family-focused services for young disabled children and their families. The programme covers England, and is funded by the Department for Education and Skills through the Sure Start Unit.

The Government has made it clear that it expects all local authorities to use Early Support principles and practice to integrate services for disabled children and their families. Early Support is expected to become a standard, integral part of the development of children’s services everywhere – in the same way that other initiatives like Sure Start Children’s Centres and the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) are being extended across the country. Read the Early Support A-Z for more information. To find out more about Children’s Centres, click here and for the Early Years Foundation Stage, click here.

Early Support is relevant to anyone who works with young children and their families. It impacts on the work of front-line professionals working for health, education, social services and voluntary organisations, across universal and specialist services, and also managers and commissioners in local authorities, health services and PCTs.

Early Support applies to all children under five. However, the principles of partnership working with families underpinning the programme also apply to older children.

Early Support began life as the Early Support Pilot Programme (ESPP) in 2002. It supports implementation of Together from the Start, guidance published by the Department for Education and Skills and the Department of Health in 2003. The government has given further commitment and funding, and early Support has become a mainstream programme, because of the consistent, positive reaction of families and professionals to the programme. Read more about the starting point here.

The programme operates as part of the Sure Start Unit, but our office is located in a voluntary organisation because the programme is supported by partnership working with a wide range of agencies working with families and children. Voluntary organisations played a particularly important role in the initial development of Early Support between 2003 and 2006.

Families and the professionals who work with them have been involved in shaping and refining Early Support at every level. Widespread consultation with families and professionals working in health, education and social services informed the development of the programme materials. Local development of services using Early Support assumes that service users will be involved alongside professionals in planning and steering change. Early Support training was developed in consultation with families, practitioners, managers and voluntary organisations.

The government’s expectation is that Early Support will become the standard approach used to co-ordinate and improve services for young disabled children and their families. This was first made clear in Sure Start guidance published in 2005 which set out the government’s expectation that all local authorities and Children’s Trusts would implement Together from the Start, using the Early Support materials. Early Support is highlighted in the National Service Framework for Children, and within the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS).

Funding to develop the provision of services for disabled children is included in the General Sure Start Grant (GSSG), and decisions about funding to support the development of Early Support at local level must therefore be taken by local authorities – but this is in the context of a clear expectation from government that all local authorities will adopt Early Support approaches, tools and principles. Read the Sure Start Ten Year Strategy for Childcare Guidance for Local Authorities here and more about the Early Years Foundation Stage here.

Early Support is being mainstreamed across the country as an integral part of the restructuring of children’s services in response to the Government green paper, Every Child Matters. It complements and supports other initiatives for children and families, like the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) and Lead Professional role and provides a practical means to deliver the aims of Every Child Matters and the NSF for families with young disabled children. It helps local authorities and health services meet the expectations of Joint Area Reviews. To read more about how Early Support links with broader initiatives to integrate services for children and families, read Change for Children.

3,500 Sure Start Children’s Centres are being created by 2010 and the government expects Early Support to be a component part of local authority planning for centres and emerging practice. However, Early Support is designed to help all families with young children with disabilities or emerging special educational need and it is also for those not currently using a Children’s Centre. Read more about Children’s Centres here.

Early Support processes and the CAF are mutually supportive. Read more about how Early Support links with the CAF here.

The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) brings together two earlier frameworks for children under five - Birth to Three Matters for very young children and Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage for children aged 3-5. Early Support is an integral part of the delivery of the EYFS for young children with disabilities or emerging special educational need. It helps staff in early years settings to work in partnership with families and other services to provide the best possible care and support for young disabled children. Detailed information about early childhood development from the Early Support Developmental Journals  has been incorporated into some EYFS Areas of Learning and Development on the EYFS CD-ROM and the EYFS material on Inclusive practice explains how Early Support can help. Read more about the Early Years Foundation Stage here.

Between 2003 and 2006, in the development phase of the programme, 45 Pathfinders developed multi-agency support for young disabled children and their families using an Early Support approach and the programme materials, feeding back their experiences to the centre to support national development of the approach and resources. See a complete list of Pathfinders and their activity here.

A few authorities that were not funded as Pathfinders began to use the approach and materials from the time the programme started up. The number of authorities engaging with the programme is growing all the time and the government expects local authority partners to step up the pace of change in 2007-2008.

No. Pathfinders were selected in 2003 to inform the first phase of development for Early Support. This phase of development is now over. Funding to develop the provision of services for disabled children is included in the General Sure Start Grant (GSSG), and decisions about funding to support the development of Early Support at local level must therefore be taken by local authorities – but this is in the context of a clear expectation from government that all local authorities should adopt Early Support approaches, tools and principles.

In 2006, Early Support identified a number of consultants across the country to work with local authorities implementing the Early Support approach by helping them get to grips with the materials, commission training and promote better co-ordinated services. Sometimes they work with individual authorities and health services and sometimes they work through regional groups of local authorities. A limited amount of consultant time is available to support local authorities free of charge, particularly those in the early stages of engaging with the programme. To read more about Early Support consultants, click here.

If you work regularly with families with young children, check whether your team leader or line manager already knows about Early Support. Discuss the programme materials with colleagues. Local multi-agency meetings at which people working for health, education, social services and voluntary organisations can discuss with families how Early Support might improve the information and service being provided locally are often particularly helpful in the early stages of introducing Early Support into an area.

If you are a parent with an interest in the programme, ask the people who work with your child most regularly whether they know about Early Support. If you have seen some of the Early Support materials and think they might help, discuss with them how you might use the materials together.

If you have strategic management responsibility for services in your area, check with managers and team leaders whether they already know about Early Support. Use the Early Support Service audit tool to review services being provided for families with young disabled children as you review your local Children and Young People’s Plan. Visit the training website to find about opportunities to support multi-agency workforce development and contact the Government Office in your region to find out whether other local authorities in your region are implementing Early Support. Consider how best to raise awareness of the programme and implement change in your area and contact Early Support or an Early Support consultant if you would like to talk with another local authority already using the programme and materials.

The Early Support materials are a flexible set of resources that can be used separately, or in combination with one another, to provide information and better co-ordinated, more family-focused support for families with a young disabled child. The materials comprise:

• an Early Support Family pack containing a Family file which helps with service co-ordination on a day-to-day basis and a series of Background information booklets about how services work;
• a range of Information for parents booklets on particular conditions or disabilities that provide standard ‘first step’ information for families;
• an Early Support Service audit tool to help service providers and managers evaluate the quality of services being provided and plan for improvement;
• a range of Monitoring protocol and Developmental journal materials, which help families track development in their child and provide a standard, shared framework for discussion about the child over time;
• materials on informed choice for families with deaf children and the professionals working with them;
• Early Support Professional guidance, which introduces those who work with families to Early Support principles and practice.

Most of the programme materials for families are now available in a second edition that incorporates suggestions from people who used the resources in 2004-2006 about how they might be improved. Read more about the materials and view them online here.

All the materials are available free of charge to families with a disabled child and professionals who work regularly with young children in England. People in countries other than England can download them from the website. To order print copies, click here.

All the programme materials were developed in consultation with families and professionals working with families with young children. Members of a working group brought together in 2003 to develop the Family pack discussed early prototypes with groups of parents of disabled children to refine thinking about what was needed, and each of the Information for parents booklets was developed in consultation with families. The publications reflect what parents and carers who ‘have been there before’ say they would like to have known in the early days of finding out about their child’s situation. The two-year process of developing the Monitoring protocol and Developmental journals involved over 200 families with young children using early versions over a period of several months and commenting on how the material might be improved.

Only written English language versions of the Early Support materials are currently available, but these are being accessed flexibly, mediated by interpreters, community-based family link workers, or key workers who share the language and culture of the home. We are developing information for families in spoken English and in a range of languages other than English in 2007- 2008 that you can download from the website or obtain on disk.

No. The Family file is designed to be used alongside the national child health record books (the red or yellow book). It adds value to what these materials provide for families, where more support is required and/or where co- ordination of multiple contacts is a particular issue. Read more about the link between the two documents here.

We have plans to develop a ‘generic’ version of the Developmental Journals, using information about early childhood development already included within the Early Years Foundation Stage. We are up-dating the Service audit tool and intend to up-date the Professional guidance for presentation online in 2007-2008.

No. The materials are designed to support relationships and partnership between families and service providers and they have the greatest impact on multi-agency service provision when they are used consistently across agencies and across a local authority or health authority. However, the materials can be used by families and professionals anywhere. If you are a professional working with families, we recommend that before starting to use the materials with families, you:

• read the ‘How to use it’ guides associated with different materials – for example How to use the Family file
• read relevant sections of the Early Support Professional guidance
• discuss the materials with colleagues find out about the training available to help you use the materials.

If you work in an area where Early Support has not yet been introduced, there’s nothing to stop you incorporating the materials into the work you do with families – but:

• check whether any one else has introduced Early Support materials to a family before you do so
  
• make sure you let anyone else working with the family know that you are using these resources.

Research at different times, in different areas of the country and on different populations, has delivered very consistent messages about the experience of service provision for families with young disabled children. Services are relatively well-developed in some parts of the country, but they are patchy. Families too often say that they find it difficult to:

• find out about the services that are available to help them
• make sense of the role of different agencies and the many different people they meet
  
• manage multiple contacts with service providers
• get professionals to understand their child’s needs in the context of the whole family
  
• have their own knowledge of their child recognised
  
• negotiate a better service where delay and bureaucracy seems to be affecting their child.
  

Early Support helps families with the co-ordination of services, provides standard information about what to expect from services, and supports partnership working between families and the professionals who work with them. To read more about this, click here.

Effective multi-agency working means different agencies like health, education, social services and voluntary organisations working in a co-ordinated way to provide effective support for families. Families with young children who use services provided by more than one agency have complained in the past that the fragmented nature of service provision creates many difficulties for them.

A single point of referral means that every time a need for additional support associated with disability is identified in a young child, families go through the same process to seek support. They are referred to a central point from which the child’s situation and family support needs are explored further. In some places, referral is to a multi-agency board, which meets regularly to review all the referrals coming in from health, education and/or social services. Families can usually also refer themselves. The idea is that whoever provides the services families eventually receive, at the point families first enter the system, they experience a standard, simple system to access services and support. For a single point of referral to be effective, it must be planned and implemented by all the services involved and everyone must agree to work to agreed, standard protocols.

A detailed, independent evaluation of Early Support activity in 2004 –2006 by a team based at the universities of Manchester and central Lancashire (formerly the University of Salford) was published in 2006. The evaluation concluded that: ‘Overall, from the perspective of both parents and professionals, Early Support is a successful programme that has had demonstrable positive effects on the quality of service provision, the well being of families and the appropriate support and development of disabled children.’ To find out more about this, click here.

A key worker is a source of support for the disabled child and the family and a link by which other services are accessed and used effectively. They have responsibility for working with the family and professionals from services and for ensuring delivery of an inter-agency care plan. (Care Co-ordination Network UK, Key worker standards, 2004). Key worker services for families have been available in some places for a number of years and there is growing understanding of their role in complementing more recent lead professional activity.

The Lead Professional Practitioner’s Guide says:

'The lead professional is not a job title or a new role, but a set of functions to be carried out as part of the delivery of effective integrated support. These functions are to:

• Act as a single point of contact for the child or family, who they can trust and who can engage them in making choices, navigating their way through the system and effecting change.
  
• Co-ordinate the delivery of the actions agreed by the practitioners involved, to ensure that children and families receive an effective service which is regularly reviewed. These actions will be based on the outcome of the assessment and recorded in a plan.
  
• Reduce overlap and inconsistency in the services received.’
  

The same Guide makes it clear that ‘where the child or family have a key worker, they are the lead professional’. Where children and families have complex needs, best practice already suggests they should have a lead professional - often called a key worker. Read the Lead Professional Practitioner’s Guide here and find out more about key working here.

Early Support promotes and facilitates the development of lead professional and key worker services for families with young disabled children and it is a key aim of the programme to increase the availability of key worker services. In practical terms, it provides guidance and simple, standard, flexible resources to support the everyday work that people undertake with families when they become a lead professional or key worker. The Family pack and the Family file in particular, help key workers manage multiple contacts, co-ordinate provision, share information and establish joint planning processes that keep families at the heart of decision making, using a Family service plan.

Anyone who works regularly with a family as part of the multi-agency team of people supporting a child can be the key worker for that family. The work is defined by the service provided, not by the professional group from which someone taking on the role of key worker comes. Yes, parents/carers can be key workers for their own family and in some areas this is already happening. Read more about key workers in the Keyworking, key workers and care co-ordination section from the Early Support Professional guidance.

Click here to find out more.