Early Support materials for families

Early Support is a government programme to improve services for young disabled children and their families. The National Autistic Society (NAS) worked with the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), parents and partners in the voluntary sector to develop the Early Support family pack, which was launched in 2004. The programme originally ran in a third of local authorities in England and is now being mainstreamed across England for children up to five years old. 

The NAS worked with TreeHouse and parents across the country to produce the booklet Information for parents: autistic spectrum disorders and related conditions. The booklet forms part of the family pack, but is also available from the DfES or the NAS free of charge. It was fully revised at the end of 2006. Many thanks to those parents who took part in the consultations and shared their experiences of the time their child was diagnosed. We hope that the booklet will be a useful source of information for parents/carers.  

The key principles of the Early Support programme are:

• to put the needs of the child and the family at centre of strategic planning processes for services that are there to support them
• to encourage service providers to work together across health, education, social care and voluntary organisation boundaries so that the provision of services to families becomes more coherent, joined up and family friendly
• to involve families at an early stage as an equal partner in planning and agreeing the support package being developed to help them.

The programme has worked with parents to develop four sets of materials, including the Early Support family pack, designed to support families through the first years of their children's lives.

The pack contains background information about the services families may need, and the support they are entitled to. This includes pan-disability information on topics such as childcare, statutory assessment, financial support, people you may meet and useful contacts. It also contains a colourful (and wipeable!) family file to support better sharing of information and coordination of service delivery. It includes a section called Introducing ourselves, which families can complete to reduce the number of times they have to repeat information to different people. A key part of the file is the Family service plan that supports joint discussion, planning and review of the services being provided for a child and their family. Any decisions made about the services and support to be provided, and who will provide them over the next few months, are recorded on the plan.

Early Support aims to bring about major change in the delivery of services and the materials form part of that programme. They are designed for use alongside the Early Support materials for professionals and the Early Support service audit tool.

The family pack contains a large amount of information and is designed for use as part of a broader support package. Local authorities receive funding, training and materials for professionals to enable them to support families and use the materials effectively. However, the information sections of the pack, including the autism section, may be of interest to families not receiving the broader support package, and they are available free of charge from the DfES.

Further information is available from the Early Support website: www.earlysupport.org.uk.

To order materials:
Information for parents: autistic spectrum disorders and related conditions is available from:

DfES publications
Tel: 0845 602 2260 (ref: ES12)

Beth Reid at the NAS
Tel: 020 7903 3565
Email: beth.reid@nas.org.uk

Unfortunately we are not able to post this publication to addresses outside the UK, but all materials can be downloaded from the Early Support website: www.earlysupport.org.uk

The Early Support family pack is available from the DfES on the telephone number above. All materials are free of charge. They can also be downloaded from the Early Support website.