Evaluation praises Early Support

The evaluation of Early Support, conducted by the Universities of Manchester and Central Lancashire (formerly Salford), has now been published. The report concludes: “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 wellbeing of families and the appropriate support and development of disabled children.”

Early Support: an evaluation of Phase 3 of Early Support, just published, is a substantial and well researched document which you can read in full at:
http://www.dfes.gov.uk/research/data/uploadfiles/RR798.pdf  (459 pages, 2.66MB*)
http://www.dfes.gov.uk/research/data/uploadfiles/RB798.pdf  (5-page summary)

Welcoming the report, John Ford, Director of Early Support said: “By any standards the findings are very positive and all Pathfinders should pat themselves on the back for all the hard work they have done over the past two to three years to make a real difference to the lives of families.”

Other notable quotes are:

• “Pathfinders demonstrated improvement in multi-agency working and significantly improved practice in the domains of: agencies co-operating to plan, manage and develop service effectively; the co-ordination of on-going support for families; making straightforward and smooth the processes of referral, identification and initial assessment.”
• “A key driver for change was the Early Support philosophy as much as the specifics of ES working practices. It promoted a shared understanding of goals and approaches that enabled in some cases previous structures of ineffective joint working to be left behind and in others current ones to be reinforced and enhanced.”
• “For those parents whose experience of Early Support included multi-agency assessment/review and keyworking then there were clear advantages to enhanced interagency working through the ES model. These were: reduced sense of burden resulting from otherwise having to co-ordinate services themselves; confidence engendered though the routine and predictable ways in which they knew professionals planned together; greater accountability and increased opportunities for parents to become involved in decision making about their child’s future.”

Condition-specific information materials were highly praised as was the background information file (particularly the section on benefits).

The Evaluation Report also drew attention to areas where we need to continue to develop our work, for example access for non-English users.

”After the joy of celebrating how far we have come we need to turn our attention to the challenges for the programme, as it moves towards national roll out and mainstreaming”, said John Ford. “We need to ensure that the lessons learned to date from the implementation and evaluation inform future development. We are delighted that the materials are so well regarded and that there is a clamour for the materials to be accessible in other languages and formats. Now that we have piloted, reviewed and are establishing final texts for the materials we need to see how the materials can be easily accessed by as wide a range of families as possible. We must also make it clear that the programme can be used further up the age range (at least to age 5) and that the programme can support many of the objectives of Every Child Matters.”

*Copies of the full report can be purchased from DfES Publications, PO Box 5050, Sherwood Park, Annesley, Nottingham NG15 0DJ, price £4.95. Cheques should be made payable to DfES Priced Publications.