What is a Early childhood Intervention Educators and Therapy Assistant?

 The role focuses on five key areas that have been identified as important to families:

1. Emotional support from family, friends and professionals.

2. Information and advice which enables them to navigate services, understand professional terminology and access resources.

3. Opportunities to identify and address their needs in parenting a child with a disability.

4. Support and developing skills in advocating for the needs of their child and family.

5. Support in service coordination.

The use of the family-centred and strengths based approaches remains central to the role.

• Holistic family services support plans.

• Integrated approaches for promoting their child's development as part of daily life or routines.

• Close working relationships between staff in children's services who work with the child and one ECI professional who knows the child and family well.

The elements of the Early childhood Intervention Educators and Therapy Assistant role are designed to build this relationship and the resources and capacity parents need to enable them to foster their child's learning and development.

The Early childhood Intervention Educators and Therapy Assistant tasks are emotional support to help parents feel good about their parenting role and what they can have achieved; information and advice to empower parents to make informed decision and actions; identifying and addressing needs to ensure families have the formal and informal supports and resources they need; advocacy to support parents' capacity to advocate for their child now and into the future; and service coordination to reduce stress, enhance service quality and build parents' capacity to manage the supports they require.

References
The Early childhood Intervention Educators and Therapy Assistant

Resources for the Early Childhood Intervention Professionals (2012) Noah's Ark Inc.

What are Yarran’s Early childhood Intervention Educators and Therapy Assistant?

Key Workers are your Early Childhood Intervention worker for your child aged under 7 years of age.

Qualified staff with a BA in Early Childhood or Diploma of Children’s Services.

Specialist knowledge and experience in understanding and supporting children’s development across all areas and in all settings.

Support children to engage, participate and be independent in all aspects if their life

Provide families with emotional, informational, and material support

Long term stable workforce.

Extensive professional development and experience in early childhood intervention

Experienced staff with life experience

What does Yarran’s Key Workers do?

• Support families.

• Value relationships with the entire family, create a team /partnership with the family to support their child.

• Respectful of each families’ beliefs values strengths and areas of need.

• Provide evidenced based support.

• Individualised support for each child and family.

• Empower families and other significant carers in a child’s life.

• Support families to access community activities and support families to make connections.

• Build child’s skills to participate in daily routines and activities – Routine Based Intervention.

• Focus on developing skills the child needs to participate and engage in everyday activities.

• Reinforce strategies and support – not duplicating them.

• Experienced in providing Individual Family Support and Service plans.

• Play based support and activities.

• Experienced in Implementing family centred practice.

• Strategies are practical and functional.

• Flexible and adaptive to a variety of settings.

• Resourceful – know where to go for support.