The Early Childhood Approach in the NDIS

The Early Childhood Approach is how the NDIS helps children younger than 6 with developmental delay or children younger than 9 with disability and their families to access the right support when they need it.

This support may be for parents of newborn baies who need additional support. i.e Cerebral Palsy.

Important: Children younger than 6 do not need a diagnosis to get support through the early childhood approach where there are concerns about their development. 

Concerns about your child’s development may include how they perform the following compared with other children their age. :

• Play and move around
• Do things to take care of themselves
• Socialise with other children
• Communicate what they want

How the NDIS early childhood approach works

The NDIS has partnered with organisations called Early Childhood Partners who are are professionals working with children:

• younger than 6 with developmental delay and their families
• younger than 9 with disability and their families. 

They are well established in communities and have experience in working with families to connect with available support.

Early childhood partners will work with you to:

• understand your child’s needs and
• connect you to the supports and services that best meet your child’s needs.
• help you apply for NDIX funding if you require more support.

These supports and services are called Early Connections.

NOTE: If an early childhood partner is not in your area, the NDIS will support you to connect with alternative options depending on where you live.

What do the NDIS Early Childhood Partners do?

Early Childhood Partners can:

• connect you to your local mainstream and community services E.g. child health service, playgroups, childcare, parent support groups, education options and recreation
• give you practical information about child development •
• use observations and information from any screening tools, assessments, or reports to understand the impact of your child’s delay or disability – NOTE: they don’t complete assessments for diagnosis
• identify if your child is likely to benefit from early support and, where appropriate, provide a short period of early supports to help you and your child to work towards goals
• support you to apply to the NDIS, including support to put together information and evidence to help work out if your child is eligible
• help you connect with best practice early childhood intervention service providers
• monitor your child’s progress and support them to transition from the early childhood approach.

Early Childhood Partners also work to build the capacity of community and mainstream services such as childcare, to increase their awareness and ability to support children with developmental delay and disability.

They focus on this because early childhood education and the opportunity to interact with other children is a critical factor in child development and wellbeing. 

When do you need to apply for the NDIS under Early Intervention?

The Early Childhood Partner will work out whether your child is likely to meet the NDIS eligibility criteria and may recommend that you apply for an NDIS plan on your child’s behalf.

Your Early Childhood Partner will support you to apply to the NDIS, including support to put together information and evidence to help work out if your child is eligible. The Early Childhood Partner will help you get the right evidence.

To meet the early intervention requirements for NDIS access, the NDIS must have evidence of ALL the following:

• You are a child younger than 6 with developmental delay.
• Early intervention will benefit you by reducing your need for supports in the future.
• Early intervention will benefit you by either reducing the impact your impairment has on your functional capacity or support your informal supports to build their skills to help you. Or the early intervention will prevent the deterioration of your functional capacity or improve it. 
• The early intervention supports you need are NDIS supports.

The NDIS will use information in your application to decide if you’re eligible for the NDIS. If you’re eligible, you become a NDIS participant.

If your child gets access to the NDIS, the Early Childhood Partner will continue to support you and will discuss with you what support your child and family needs. This is called an NDIS planning meeting.

After the planning meeting you will get a copy of your child’s NDIS plan. It will include how much NDIS funding is in the plan and what you can spend it on.

Generally, you can use your child’s NDIS plan to pay for therapy, equipment and support for your family.

How to find NDIS Supports

Ask the MyCareSpace team for help

Once you are approved for NDIS funding you will need to:

1. Decide how you want to manage your NDIS plan: self managed, plan managed and agency managed. We recommend Plan Hero Plan Management for parents beacuse they are plan managers that know exactly the kind of support that parents need.

2. Spend you NDIS funding on reasonable and necessary suports that help you child reach their goals.

3. Typical funded supports for a child may include:

• Support Worker - These supports may assist with personal care and other core supports. Typicall parents receive less support when a child is under 15.
• Allied Health Therapies - These may include Physiotherapy, Occupational Therapy and more.
• Assistive technology (AT) - This can help children work to their goals. AT can help with family relationships, friendships, education, play and household tasks. 
  Specifically AT can be use for: 
  • support with communication, support with mobility and
  • support at home and in the community
• Consumables - Includes continence supports that are more expensive because of a child's disability or are required when a child would not usually need them (e.g at the age of 5 years)

4. You must engage Registered NDIS Providers who are registererd to provide Early Intervention Supports. Not all therapists are registered to deliver this level of support. This is a SPECIFIC registration group for providers.
Ask the MyCareSpace Team to help you find Thearpy

5.Ask MyCareSpace to help you find supoports:

Ask us now

Extra Information

• About MyCareSpace
• About Plan Hero Plan Management for Parents
• Factsheet on Early Connections
• Fact Sheet on Applying to the NDIS