Effective early intervention enables children to maximise their future opportunities and independence and contributes to the long-term sustainability of the Scheme. 

It has been widely reported that a higher than expected number of young children entered the scheme during the NDIS trial, raising concerns about cost pressures. The introduction of the ECEI Approach is designed to help determine which young children with disability or developmental delay would benefit from short-term less-intensive intervention (along with advice to their families and mainstream providers such as early childhood services and kindergartens) and which children should become NDIS participants.