SUMMARY The international movement to develop school enhancement strategies in secondary schools recognizes the important relationship between school, family, and community as a crucial medium for assisting disadvantaged children (Crowson and Boyd, 1993). These children are equally the responsibility of social work and other public services. Many local authorities in Scotland throughout the 1980s established what have become known as 'youth strategies' to improve formal co-operation between education and social work, health and police services. This was an attempt to ensure early identifica tion of young people's difficulties in the expectation of promoting social welfare, enhancing educational attainment, and preventing, among other things, school absent eeism and the difficulties associated with school failure. In recent years, the ambition of such strategies has been to focus on primary-aged children and their families, as a preventive and protective approach to the damaging effects of multiple disadvantage. This paper reports on an innovative project which was established to assist pre-school children experiencing multiple disadvantage to make a successful transition from home to primary school. The importance of good collaborative service provision is high lighted, together with an exploration of parents as educators, the provision of social services in an educational setting, and issues of multi-disciplinary provision.