The Children's Inclusion Fund (CHIF) is a limited resource held by Early Years that can be made available to fund child care and support children's inclusion in mainstream early years settings.
In the autumn of 2009, a review took place of the Children's Inclusion Fund to look at whether it was meeting the needs of the most vulnerable young children in the authority and how to make it sustainable.
The outcome of the review was that 2 types of support will be available from September 2010, the Flying Start programme and Inclusion Support Funding:
- Flying Start is for children aged from 2 years whose development and learning is significantly affected by things that prevent them getting the support they need. This includes support from their family and the environment in which they live.
- Inclusion Support Funding is for children with complex needs to provide some additional staffing or specialist advice to support the child’s development and learning in their mainstream setting in the year before they start school.
For more details about either of these, please download the Information leaflet from the right hand side of this page. The guidelines and criteria used to make decison about CHIF support/funding are also available on this page.
For more details information about CHIF, and for forms for assessors/providers, please visit this page.