Early Support Programme

What is Early Support?
Early Support is a national programme to improve the way that services for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities work with families. It provides families, practitioners and key workers with information, guidance and resources to ensure the best support is given the child.

Early Support is relevant to all agencies that provide services for families:

• hospital and clinical settings
• Child Development Centres
• mainstream early years settings
• Sure Start children's centres
• a range of specialist support agencies, including portage services
• voluntary organisations

Early Support is for families with disabled children under five and anyone who regularly works with them. A wide range of people use Early Support, including:

• families leaving hospital with young babies 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 multiple significant factors affecting development and learning
• children who have less obvious difficulties.

A children's centre in each district has been chosen to be the champion of Early Support. The champion children's centre will:

• link with early years professionals,
• keep up to date on latest information
• hold information on early years training and feed it through to other children's centres in the district.

You can contact the champion children's centres if you would like help and support for your family: