Early intervention & funding

The Enabling Guide: How to Use It for Your Autistic Child

By Wei Chun · Last updated 8 October 2026

The short answer

The Enabling Guide is a website that lists, in one place, the help Singapore offers people with disabilities and the family members who care for them. It lives at enablingguide.sg. SG Enable, which runs many of Singapore’s disability schemes, built it with funding from the government and donors.

For an autistic child, it gathers the programmes, services and subsidies run by government agencies, charities and businesses. That covers early intervention before seven, school and student care in the school years, and day centres after 18.

What it does not do is apply for you. It tells you what exists and who to ask. For the schemes this guide walks through, the application usually goes in through a professional, such as the hospital that assessed your child, a therapist or a social worker.

Some schemes let you apply yourself. For example, if your child is 7 or older and their disability status is already verified, you can apply for their bus and train concession card through SimplyGo. If nobody is helping you yet, you can call SG Enable and ask where to start.

Being told to “check the Enabling Guide” can feel like being handed a phone book. So here it is walked by your child’s age, and you only need to read the part that fits.

A parent at the dining table notes a short list from a laptop while their child lines up wooden blocks on the floor behind them.

Dictionary: SG Enable · EIPIC · EIPIC-P · DS-Plus · ECDA · SPED · Day Activity Centre · Deputyship · LPA

What is on the Enabling Guide

The site’s top menu has five main doors. At any one age, two or three of them will matter to you.

I’m Looking For Disability Support holds the schemes and services, sorted by topic: therapy and intervention, child and adult care, education, training and employment, money matters, transport, assistive technology, and leisure.
Understanding Disability has a page for each type of disability, autism included, and a section on life stages and the moves between them.
Caring For Caregivers is about you rather than your child. The Caregiver Learning Roadmap sits here.
Service Directory lists the places themselves: day activity centres, special education schools, disability homes and more.
My Guide is a short set of questions that narrows all of this down to your child.

If you bookmark one page, make it the Enabling Guide’s autism page. It links to its own lists of early intervention centres, student care centres, SPED schools and day activity centres that serve autistic children and adults. SPED means special education.

Use MyGuide to find what fits your child

MyGuide is the site’s own finder. It asks three short questions and then shows your results, and your child’s age comes first.

On enablingguide.sg, open My Guide from the top menu.
Choose your child’s age group: Young Children (0 to 6), Children and Teens (7 to 18), or Adults (18 and above). You pick one.
Choose what your child has. Autism is one of the options, and you can tick more than one.
Choose the topics you want, such as therapy and intervention, education, or money matters. If you do not know yet, there is an “I’m not sure” option.
Press “Get Your Guide” and read the list of information and services it gives you.

MyGuide says it points you to information and services “to help you get started”. Nothing on the tool checks whether your child qualifies for a scheme. That check happens later, with the people who send the application.

Note down the two or three schemes that match your child’s age. Then read the age section below that fits.

Before 7: early intervention

For a young child, the Enabling Guide’s autism page starts with early intervention. That means therapy and learning support for children with developmental needs, given early, in a centre or a preschool.

The same page calls EIPIC, the Early Intervention Programme for Infants and Children, likely the best-known programme for children with special needs. It is for children who need a medium to high level of support, and it runs at early intervention centres. There is a track for children under 2 and one for children aged 2 to 6.

A child who needs a lower level of support may go to DS-Plus, Development Support Plus, instead. It is for children aged 2 to 6 who attend a preschool, and the support comes to them there. How the programmes differ is in our comparison of the early intervention programmes.

EIPIC-P is the same kind of subsidised programme at private early intervention centres. ECDA, the Early Childhood Development Agency under the Ministry of Social and Family Development, appoints them.

As of September 2026, new EIPIC-P referrals are paused. SG Enable stopped taking them from 1 June 2026 and says they resume in Q4 2026, for places from January 2027.

Children already enrolled keep receiving subsidised services. What the pause means for your child is in our separate guide.

One age rule to know early. Children aged 6 and above can only be referred to EIPIC until 1 June each year, unless the Ministry of Education has approved a deferral of their Primary 1 start.

The school years, 7 to 18

From seven, school takes over. The Enabling Guide’s autism page puts it plainly: education is compulsory, so at seven your child enrols in either a mainstream primary school or a SPED school.

The page points to the Ministry of Education’s own guides for that choice. Ours is mainstream or SPED: how to decide, and the schools themselves are in our SPED school directory.

Alongside school, there is student care. A Special Student Care Centre, or SSCC, looks after SPED students aged 7 to 18 before and after school. The care may include help with schoolwork, and social and life skills for living more independently.

For families who qualify for the student care subsidy, the fee is capped according to household income. The Enabling Guide’s SSCC page lists the appointed centres and the fee cap for each income band.

After 18

After school, the Enabling Guide’s adult pages take over. One service it lists for autistic adults is the Day Activity Centre, or DAC.

It gives adults with disabilities aged 18 and above care and skills training in the day, for daily living and for getting about in the community, with social and leisure activities too. It also gives carers a break during the day.

The Enabling Guide’s DAC page also says SPED students should be encouraged to stay in school until they graduate. So 18 is when a DAC place becomes possible, not a deadline to leave school.

Among the other adult services it lists are sheltered workshops and adult disability homes. Our guide to adult disability services walks through those two and the DAC, and autism after 18 covers the transition years.

Turning 21 changes who can sign. Up to 21, a parent consents to a DAC application.

From 21, if your child lacks mental capacity, meaning they cannot make that decision for themselves in law, the consent has to come from their appointed deputy or donee, the people with legal authority to decide for them. A deputy is a person the court appoints to do that. A donee is someone your child chose earlier, in a legal document called a Lasting Power of Attorney, to decide for them if they lost that ability.

The Enabling Guide’s autism page raises this before it arrives. As an autistic child nears 21, it says, parents may want to consider applying to be their court-appointed deputy, and it names the assisted deputyship scheme as help.

SG Enable runs that scheme, the Assisted Deputyship Application Programme. Our deputyship guide takes you through it step by step.

What the Enabling Guide does not do

Reading the Enabling Guide, or finishing MyGuide, does not apply for anything. For four of the five schemes in this guide, someone else sends the application for you, usually a professional who already works with your child.

The Enabling Guide calls the place where that professional works a touchpoint. That means a public hospital or a social service agency, one of the community organisations that run many of these services.

A social worker passes a form across a table to a parent holding a folder of their child's documents. — For early intervention, day activity centres and the Assistive Technology Fund, a professional such as a doctor, social worker or therapist usually sends the application for you.

The Assistive Technology Fund, or ATF, shows how it works. It pays part of the cost of devices such as hearing aids and wheelchairs, and autism is one of the disabilities it covers.

As of September 2026, the ATF pays up to 90% of the cost, up to S$40,000 over a lifetime. The share depends on your household income, and one condition is a monthly income of S$4,800 or less per person in the household.

You cannot send an ATF application yourself. The Enabling Guide’s ATF page says a social worker and an assessor, such as a therapist, from a touchpoint assess your child, complete the application and submit it for you.

The other schemes in this guide work much the same way, with one exception.

Who sends the application, scheme by scheme. From the Enabling Guide’s own scheme pages, as of September 2026.
Scheme	Age	Who sends the application
EIPIC	Before 7	The hospital or private paediatrician who assessed your child, with your consent, to SG Enable. SG Enable then contacts you within 10 working days.
EIPIC-P	Before 7	SG Enable, to the private centre you choose, once it has your child’s EIPIC referral. New referrals are paused until Q4 2026.
Special Student Care Centre	7 to 18	You can. Contact the nearest centre with your child’s medical documents, or ask the school’s social worker or the hospital’s medical social worker to help.
Day Activity Centre	18 and above	A social service professional from a touchpoint. With no touchpoint, you may approach SG Enable.
Assistive Technology Fund	Any age	A social worker and an assessor, such as a therapist, from a public hospital or social service agency.

If nobody is helping your child right now, you are not stuck. For a Day Activity Centre, the Enabling Guide says you may go to SG Enable directly.

For the Assistive Technology Fund, the site says to ask a polyclinic for a referral to a public hospital, which then assesses your child and applies. For anything else, call SG Enable on 1800-8585-885 or email contactus@sgenable.sg, and ask who should send the application.

The Caregiver Learning Roadmap: the part that is for you

Most of the Enabling Guide is about your child. The Caregiver Learning Roadmap is about you: what a parent or carer can learn, and when it helps to learn it.

SG Enable launched it on 8 November 2023. It covers 28 skills across five caregiving areas:

identifying and understanding disability
managing your caregiving role
providing care
supporting your loved one through transitions
planning for care

You can also view it by disability type, and autism is one of the five types. SG Enable calls it a companion that helps carers find the knowledge and skills they need at different stages of caring.

Two areas line up with the age walk above. Between them, planning for care and supporting your loved one through transitions hold the information on future care planning and the pathways after school. Both are worth opening in the school years, well before 18 and 21 arrive.

SG Enable links the roadmap to the Enabling Masterplan 2030, the government’s plan for Singapore as an inclusive society in 2030, and to the plan’s recommendation on helping carers plan for the future.

Enabling Guide or SupportGoWhere?

You may also be sent to SupportGoWhere. It is a separate government website, not part of the Enabling Guide.

On the Enabling Guide’s pages for the Day Activity Centre and the Assistive Technology Fund, SupportGoWhere comes up for one job. Several schemes now ask for proof of disability on one standard form, the Disability Verification Form, or DVF, used since 8 September 2025.

Before you meet a touchpoint, the Enabling Guide suggests you log in to SupportGoWhere with Singpass to see whether your child’s disability status is already verified. If it is, a scheme such as the Day Activity Centre does not need a new form.

So use the Enabling Guide to learn what exists for your child and who runs it. Use SupportGoWhere for the Singpass check.

If you would rather not do that online, your touchpoint or SG Enable’s phone line can check it too. For the cards and concessions, see which disability card your child actually needs.

Your next step

Open MyGuide on the Enabling Guide, choose your child’s age group and autism, and note the two or three schemes it shows. Then check the table above to see who sends each application.

If no doctor, school or social worker is helping you apply, call SG Enable on 1800-8585-885 and ask where to start. For your next read, open our EIPIC guide if your child is under 7, mainstream or SPED: how to decide if they are 7 to 18, or our guide to adult disability services if they are 18 or older.