Early Support is for families who have a baby or young child with additional support needs because of a disability or emerging special education need. Programme goals include better joint assessment and planning processes for individual children and their families, better information for families, and the use of key worker services to improve the continuity and co-ordination of support available to families. An independent evaluation concluded that, overall, Early Support is a very successful programme. In particular the evaluation found that Early Support benefits families, either through information materials only or through information accompanied by a key worker service. The evaluation also found a significant demonstrable improvement in co-ordination of support for families, multi-agency planning/working together, and smoother processes of identification, referral and initial assessment. Intervention approaches An important challenge ahead for the early intervention field is to understand the relative effects of different approaches for children with different developmental needs. There is debate in the literature about the role of parent education and training in early intervention. On the one hand, parents appear to want parent education, and studies show a relationship between mother-child interactions and early intervention effectiveness. On the other, there is concern about the potential of parent education to alter the nature of the home, changing it from a natural environment to an unnatural one, and disrupting family relationships. One meta-analysis found that children receiving direct educational experiences showed larger and more enduring benefits than those in programmes relying on intermediary routes, such as parent training.