Alicia - Okay, well we might get started. Thank you everybody for joining us on Monday morning to talk about the 2025 Health and Development Participation grant. My name's Alicia Kenyon and I am the relieving manager of the Health and Development Checks team at the Department of Education. I'd like to begin today by acknowledging country.

I'm calling in today from the land of the Darug people, where I live, work, and play. I'd like to pay my respects to the Elders past and present. I'd like to extend that respect to the lands of all of, that everyone is dialling in from and I'd like to acknowledge that wherever you're dialling in from today, you're dialling in from Aboriginal land. I'd like to also extend my respect to our Aboriginal colleagues, both from health and from, sorry, from education. As we gather today to talk about Health and Development Checks and the 2025 grant to support our littlest learners, I just encourage everybody to keep Aboriginal children and their families the front and centre of everything that they do and to help children's development.

Okay, so again, thank you for joining us. It's wonderful to see so many people online to hear about our 2025 grant, and we're very excited to share the information with you. So just a little bit of housekeeping before we get started. We have a Q&A function, so as we go through, if you've got any questions, please feel free to put them into the Q&A and my team who are online with me today will endeavour to answer those questions. If you have any questions afterwards, at the end of the session today, we will provide you with our email address so you can send any questions you have after today to that email address and we will be able to respond to you.

Okay, so we're going to start this morning just by having a quick overview of the Health and Development Check program. So some of you will be familiar with it. Some of you would've already had our health colleagues out to deliver Health and Development Checks for your 4-year-olds, and some probably aren't familiar with the program at all. So just a quick overview to start with. So Health and Development Checks in ECE services is in a partnership between New South Wales Health and the Department of Education. We know that many children are not getting their 4-year-old health and development Checks, and we also know that about 2 in 5 children are not starting school developmentally on track.

So regular health and development checks are important as they give families crucial insights to how their children are tracking before they start school. The Health and Development Check program in Early Childhood Education and Care builds on existing services that already function, so families can take their child to get a health and development check done at their local child and family health service, their local GP or their local Aboriginal medical Service. Increasing the number of children who complete their 4-year-old Health and Development Check can help families access information and the support that they need to support their child's health growth and development before the child starts school. Each of our local health districts have tailored the program to their capacity and their community's needs, but broadly speaking, a health and development check will look something like this.

So before the check happens, before the local health district visit your service, teachers and educators will be asked to help support the families to complete the required forms and just discuss the visit with the children so they are prepared for the day and they feel comfortable. On the day of the check, the visiting health professionals will conduct the checks in a private room or space at your service. You will need to ensure that a staff member is with the children at all times and provide some feedback to the families about the child's experience. Following the checks, we encourage you to encourage the families to share the results of the check so that you can best support the child, child's development, sorry, at your service.

You can also ask your local health district team for a service summary. This will provide you with an overview of the key developmental needs of the children at your service. Thank you. The Health and Development Check program has been rolling out since September last year, and it's now available in 14 local health districts.

Health professionals from New South Wales Health will come out to your service and they will check the children's health and development, which includes looking at their listening and talking skills, their gross and fine motor skills, their learning, thinking, and problem solving skills, as well as how their bodies are growing. So looking at their height, their weight, and their teeth. As a part of developing the program, we consulted with the sector last year to identify how we would be able to roll out the program and we saw that there could be some barriers to participating in the program. This information helped form the 2024 Health and Development Participation grant. This slide is a visual representation of the grants and how they were distributed across the state.

So following on from the success of the grant from this year 2024, we are excited to tell you about the 2025 Health and Development Participation grant. With this grant, we're aiming to support services uptake of the Health and Development participation, sorry, the Health and Development Check program, especially services in lower socioeconomic areas, services that have high number of culturally and linguistically diverse families and services that have a high number of Aboriginal families. As well as this, we are hoping to increase the capability of teachers and educators to implement the program and to embed supports for children following the check.

We're also trying to align with the local health district's equity strategies and their capacity to deliver the program. Throughout the year, we've listened to feedback about the 2024 grant. We listened to the sector and we listened to our local health districts, and we've learned some lessons along the way and we changed the 2025 participation grant to reflect these lessons. So some of the things that we've changed, so the applications for 2025 are open now. We've opened them much earlier than what we did for 2024 grant, and this will allow for services and the health district more time to plan and allocate funds.

We revised the categories of the program and we looked at the program guidelines and updated those. When we go through the program, once we've got all the applications, we will also make sure that we better align the number of grants with district capacity across the state. So now I'm going hand over to Hannah and she's going to tell you a little bit more about the categories.

Hannah - Thanks, Alicia. My name's Hannah Hayes, and I am the policy officer within the Health and Development Checks team. I would love to just run you through the categories in some further detail. So in 2025, we have 2 categories.

Category one funding can be used to provide, sorry, just lost my notes. Can be used to provide relief time, overtime payments, or travel costs for educators and teachers in order to undertake administrative duties related to the checks to support children during the check and to engage in related professional development.

Category 2 can be used to build capacity of ECEC educators and teachers to support children's health and developmental needs. This might include workshops, accessing workshops on children's health and development, engaging with allied health professionals in order to support children's health and development at a cohort level, or the purchasing or provision of resources in order to support children's development. Please note that services applying for Category one funding will need to commit to participating in the program in 2025 and having the district team deliver Health and Development Checks for 4-year-olds at their service. Services applying for category 2 funding are welcome to participate in the HDC program, but this is not a requirement for this category of funding. Many of the ECEC services eligible for the HDC program are also eligible for the Health and Development Participation grant.

This includes not-for-profit community preschools that are centre-based, not-for-profit long daycares and standalone for-profit long daycare services. These are for-profit providers operating a single long daycare service. Public preschools are also eligible for funding and we encourage them to apply through an expression of interest form. We are also extending this grant to multifunctional Aboriginal children's services, Aboriginal child and family centres and Aboriginal community controlled organisations that deliver Health and Development Checks. This is in recognition that many of these services already deliver Health and Development Checks and should be supported even if they are currently sitting outside the HDC program. Please note that for eligible providers who wish to make a bulk application on behalf of more than 10 services, there is an option for this in the application form.

ECEC services who received the grant in 2024 can apply for the 2025 grant. If your service will not receive a Health and Development Check visit from your local health district before the end of this year, you will not be able to apply for category one, but you will be able to apply for category 2. I have some few important dates for you to remember. Applications are now open and they will close on the 20th of December. We will distribute notification letters to services in February and we will communicate that services have until the 31st of December, 2025 to spend their grant funds. Acquittals will be required by June, 2026. I'm just going to pass back over to Alicia now.

Alicia - Okay, just checking that everyone can hear okay, I just saw a few messages about the audio, so I'm hoping that has been sorted out. But if you're missing some of the content and you have questions, please just email our inbox, again, that will come up on the screen right now, so you can email us if you have any questions. Okay, so if you want some extra information, please jump onto one of our websites.

So the first QR code and website that you can see on the screen right now will take you to our health and development participation, sorry, our Health and Development Check program webpage. So it'll tell you more about the program itself and New South Wales Health coming out to your service. The one in the middle links to our program guidelines. So we encourage everybody who wants to apply to please go and look at the program guidelines, have a read before you apply, but that QR code will take you to that. And if you have more questions, you can always visit our FAQ page, which is the one, the last one on the right hand side. If you can't find the answer to the question that you want in our FAQ page, as I said before, please contact us at EarlyChildhoodDevelopment@det.nsw.edu.au, and we will get back to you with an answer to your question.

Okay, so that just leaves us with the application link and the QR code. So after listening today, if you'd like to apply for the 2025 grant, we encourage you to, we encourage you to go read the program guidelines, make sure your service is eligible to apply for the grant, and then go to the SmartyGrants link and apply. We look forward to receiving applications and questions following today. So we might just stay online for a couple of minutes to try and answer the questions that are coming through, but as I said after that, if you've got any questions, please just email us. Thank you. Okay, we're just going to come online and answer some of the questions so everybody can hear the answers. This question says, "What information do you require in the application? Do you need specific names and prices of proposed training? Or is a general statement about upskilling staff sufficient?" So in the application you'll be asked which category you would like to apply for, and then you're asked to give a small summary of what you would put the money towards.

So a general comment about staff capability uplift will be sufficient. You don't need to break it down and show us exactly how much money is going to go to what specific training. When you do your acquittals in 2026, you will need to provide that information. But for now, just giving us a general overview of training that you would like to attend or send your staff to will be sufficient. Okay, let's see if we can find another question.

This one says, "Can we apply for 2025 visits if we haven't applied in 2024? Are you still catching up on 2024 visits in 2025?" So, as we said throughout the webinar this morning, we are working very closely with our local health district teams so that we can provide grants to services across the state that will meet the capacity of the LHDs. You can absolutely apply for the 2025 grant if you didn't apply in 2024, and you can apply for category one and category 2, and if you get a category one grant, you will get a Health and Development Check visit from your local health district. We are, the local health districts in some of the areas across the state are still completing the Health and Development Checks for the 2024 recipients and they will continue to do so throughout next year. I hope that answers the question. This one says, "Can services in Northern Rivers, Northern New South Wales apply for category one funding?" And the answer is yes, absolutely. You can apply for it. Again, if you've got the 2024 grant and you have not yet had a visit and you're going to have one next year, you can't apply for category one. But if you're a new service and you didn't get a grant in 2024, you can absolutely apply for the 2025 one. Northern Rivers or Northern New South Wales will hopefully be providing checks to services in early 2025.

So this question says, "Are services able to view what the assessment looks like prior to applying?" So I think that's referring to the application form, and you can absolutely go to the link at SmartyGrants and have a look at the application form before you apply. You can start and then you can come back later and finish it. So yeah, absolutely, you can go in and have a look at the application form and see what it entails before you've completed. If we're talking in that question about what the assessments look like when the health service comes out, each local health district is slightly different. So I would encourage you to reach out to your local health district and ask them about what their check entails.

Okay, so this one says, "Just to clarify, a for-profit provider that operates 2 services, would they not be eligible?" And the answer is any, it's only for for-profit services that have one service. So if you've got 2 or more, then no, you will not be eligible to apply. But again, I really encourage everyone to go to the program guidelines and read them just to see which services are eligible to apply and which ones are not.

Okay, so this one says "We received the 2024 grant, but as yet our LHD has not rolled out all provided checks, are we still able to use our 2024 grant?" And the answer is yes, you can. Please get in contact with us if you are not going to be having your checks completed before the 31st of May, 2025, and we will discuss options with you, but you can absolutely spend your money in category 2 and category 3 of the 2024 grant guidelines. So again, go back and have a bit of a read of what the 2024 guidelines were and spend your money in category 2 or category 3 and get in contact with us. Okay, I think there's, that's most of the questions. Team, is there anything else that's come up that you think we should reply to while we're online?

This is a great question. So this one says, "Where is the best place to look and find capacity building workshops for staff, and in the area of language development?" So we do have a PDF on our webpage of recommended learning. So my first suggestion would be to jump online to our website and have a look and you can have a look at that training. We also have more coming your way. Our team have been working really hard this year on a communicate and connect toolkit, which hopefully will be released early next year. So there will be some workshops around that as well.

So watch this space and your emails coming in about, yeah, our awesome toolkit that will be released next year. I saw a question pop up, but I seem to have lost it about bulk applications and you can absolutely do that just through the SmartyGrants link. There is an option as you're filling it out to add in additional informations if you've got services, more than 10 services that you would like to apply for in one go. So please just jump onto the link and have a look. Team, do we have any others that you think would be good to answer online? No. Okay. Well thank you all for joining today. Again, if you've got any questions or anything that pops into your mind after we finish today, please just send us an email and we're happy to reply to you and give you the information that you need. Thanks again, guys.

MAJA O'DELL: Yeah, might kick off. So, hi everyone, and thanks for joining our webinar on the Health and Development Participation Grant today. My name is Maja O'Dell and I'm the manager of our Health and Development Checks team here at the Department of Education. First, I would like to start this webinar by acknowledging the various lands we’re all joining on from today. And I'm here on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and I'd like to pay my respect to elders past and present. I'd also like to acknowledge all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are joining us on the call today and recognize the important contribution that this program can make to supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in the early years. So in today's presentation we'll start with a quick overview of the HDC program before moving on to the specifics of the HDP Grant.

MAJA: We've put some set aside, time aside, I should say, for the Q&A is at the end, but if you have any questions as we go through the webinar, put them into our Q&A function there on the screen. Hopefully you can see that and our team can answer them as we go and there will also be some extra time at the end for Q&A’s if there’s sort of something you think about and want to ask at the end and if you have any trouble with that Q&A function, you can email your questions through to our inbox and we'll share that in our chat. So just, I’ll kick off and just as a quick refresher, Health and Development Checks in ECEC is a partnership between New South Wales Health and the Department of Education. Now we know that many children in New South Wales are not getting their four year old health and development check. About two in five children are also starting school developmentally off track and regular health and development checks are important to give families crucial insights into how their children are tracking before they start school, and also ensure that children and families are getting the support they need as soon as possible. The health and development checks in Early Childhood and Education and Care program builds on existing services where parents and carers can access their child's health and development checks, such as their local doctor or their child and family health nurse or the local Aboriginal Medical service.

MAJA: Next slide, please. Health and development checks in ECEC will be available to four year olds who attend participating early childhood education and care services. And these include community preschools and long day care services. Health professionals from New South Wales Health from their local health districts will check children's health and development in the ECEC service, and this might include their listening and talking skills, their social skills and behaviour, their gross and fine motor skills, their learning thinking and problem solving skills and how their bodies are growing. Importantly, this program is free and will be opt in for both families and services. Next slide, please. So just a little refresher. Again, I know a lot of you have probably attended some of these sessions, but just a refresher on how the program will actually work. So in terms of scheduling, the local health district teams will contact services to let them know that they are able to offer the health and development checks. And if you're a service, you can also email your local health district to let them know you'd like to host the program at your ECEC service in 2024. Just please keep in mind that local health districts are dealing with a high volume of requests and will do their best to get back to you as soon as possible. They will work with services to find a time that is convenient for them to receive the check. What are we hoping teachers and educators will do? Well, we're asking them to assist with collecting consent forms and pre assessment questionnaires, preparing families and children for the check, ensuring child educator ratios are being met, following regulations on Working With Children Checks and ensuring children are not left alone with visiting health staff. Our health professionals from the LHD’s will liaise with services throughout the process, including talking to services about anything they want to highlight going into the checks and they will complete the check and provide families with a report after the check, with referrals being provided as required. Each LHD will be responsible for managing the referral pathways in their districts. Parents can share the reports with the service and have discussions about support for their child independent from the program if they wish. We've also got our Education Local Reform [...] Local Reform and Commissioning Team that sits with us here in Education, and they are a group of group within DoE who will be offering local implementation support on the ground as the project continues to roll out. And our team here in Health and Development Checks is working really closely with that team to make sure our services get that support on the ground.

MAJA: The HDC program just as a little bit of scene setting began rolling out in September last year and is now we can proudly say, available in 12 of the 15 local health districts in New South Wales. And you can see there, these are the ones marked in green on the map there. The remaining three LHD, Northern New South Wales, Northern Sydney and Far West will begin rolling out the program before the end of this year, 2024. We just want to, and I'll get to the grant obviously in a minute, but if checks are not being rolled out in your LHD yet, so if you're one of those three days, this doesn't preclude you from applying from this grant. You can find out which LHD your service belongs to using the New South Wales Health Interactive map and just at the end of this webinar, we'll do a little link and a poll and you can find out which LHD you belong to. So we'll do that towards the end. And there are a couple of ways to express your interest in the program. If you're one of the 12 LHD’s that have commenced roll out, you can get your LHD’s email from our website which we'll share and is also at the end of this presentation. Or, if your service is in the remaining three LHD’s, you can email our team and we'll also share those details and will connect you and make sure you have all the information you need.

MAJA: Next slide, please. So as part of developing this HDC program, we consulted the ECEC sector last year and services identified a few elements that might become barriers to participating in the program. So as a first step, we've developed this one off grant to help overcome some of the barriers and encourage services to participate in the program in 2024. The Health and Development Participation Grant and I'm going to just call it the HDP Grant because it rolls off the tongue a little bit better will mean that eligible services can apply for up to seven and a half thousand dollars to spend in one or more of the of the following categories. So these are and they're listed there on the screen for you, But I'm just going to go through them in a little bit more detail. So category one funding for staffing to support the HDC program category two suitable space to conduct the checks and Category three building capacity in ECEC services to support children's developmental needs. It's important to note that to be eligible for the grant ECEC services must participate in a check in 2024 you don't need to be booked in for a check when you submit your application, but as mentioned earlier, we would encourage you to reach out to your LHD to expressed interest in the program when you're applying for the actual grant. And we, our team will continue to work with LHD to understand if there are any services that have received the grant but have not been able to schedule a check. And we've got some provisions in the guidelines for our team to assess circumstances where checks, for whatever reason, can't happen in 2024 on a case by case basis. So while this grant is for 2024 only and it's currently, as I said, a one off one year grant, our team here is considering other ways that we can continue to support the sector on an ongoing basis.

MAJA: Next slide, please. So like I said, we thought it would be helpful to give you a few more examples of the things you might use the different categories of funding on to help you with your application. And so just go through some of these are category one funding can be used to provide relief time, over time payments or travel costs for educators and teachers to undertake tasks such as administrative duties related to the checks for staff to support children during the checks, and to engage in related professional development. Category two funding can be used for a repurposing or refurbishing of rooms or spaces within the service to provide a suitable space to conduct the checks. A suitable space is a place that allows the program to be conducted privately. This can be a separate room area or classroom within an ECEC setting. Some services, we've noticed, have been sectioning off an area of the classroom to use, so similarly to how they might conduct the StEPS program. This category can also be used for venue hire where suitable space is not available within the service. If you do need to use an offset location to take part in the program, services are required to follow the New South Wales regulations, including risk assessments and written authorisations so parents do not have to attend any off site checks. But these would need to be supervised by educators and teachers. Services are encouraged to check and explore the Department of Education Resources and transporting children safely, which can be found on the website at the bottom of the slide, yes, just checking that we've included that there, and on our website and so more details about this off site check is also available in our program guidelines, which you'll need to familiarise yourself with before applying for the grant and category two funding. So this same bucket can also be used for the purchase of resources to support children's learning and development. And we would just note here that any resources should be purchased to provide support to all children your service rather than support an individual child in your service. Individual support will be managed by LHD’s in the form of specialist referrals, where concerns are identified and then I'll just jump to category three. So some of the examples here, you can use this funding bucket to cover travel costs, course fees and relief time to attend relevant training. So this is slightly different to that category one in that the relief time here is for actually attending training, capacity building and so some of the things, some of the training might include things like the Northern Sydney LHD NESA accredited program or attending the ECA conference. This third bucket can also be used to engage external providers for specialised education programs to support developmental needs though this would need to be delivered to the whole group of children at the service with a focus on upskilling educators and teachers to implement support strategies on an ongoing basis. This third category of funding can also be used to engage community members, to support community member or members to support the participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families. To assist your service in selecting professional development, which you can spend this third category of funding on. our team is developing a list of training courses available within the Department, which will provide you some idea of how you might wish to spend the funding for capacity building. We expect this to be available shortly on that grant website where all of this information will be contained.

MAJA: So moving on to the next slide. Right. So this is an important one, which a lot of people will have a lot of interest in - who can apply. And so many of the ECEC services that are eligible for the Health and Development Check program itself are also eligible for this grant. So this includes not for profit community preschools that are centre based, not for profit long daycare services and standalone full profit long daycare services, which are for profit providers operating a single long daycare service as identified by NQAITS. So this means that for profit providers operating multiple services are not eligible for this grant. I just wanted to call out importantly, that we're extending this grant to multi-functional Aboriginal children's services. Aboriginal child and family centres and Aboriginal community controlled organizations that deliver health and development checks. So this is in recognition that these services already deliver health and development checks and should be supported even if these checks are outside of our HDC program. So that grant is still open to those services, even if they're technically not a part of our paid program. Just note here. I'll say that for eligible providers who wish to make a bulk application on behalf of more than ten services, there is an option for this in the application form and I'll go through that in our next slide a little bit more onto the next slide.

MAJA: So we just thought would show a little bit of the application form and a little bit of the application process itself. So hopefully this is useful to some of you who haven't made yourself familiar with the form. So, one of the things we thought might need a little bit of explanation is that as part of the application form, we will ask you to select one or more of the three funding categories and you will have 300 words to briefly explain how you intend to use the funding if you are successful according to each category you have selected. Now, this is the only free text part of the form. So this is the only part where you're actually going to have to answer with free text as as I just said. So please note that this is flexible and it's okay if your final spend is different to what you have included in your application. But I will say that there will be an acquittals process where you will be required to report to the department how you have spent the grant funding and this will be due due by June 2025. So even if the information is different, you'll still need to make sure you keep things like receipts, timesheets and other documentation to demonstrate how you have spent your money. And that process will need to take place before June 2025 as I said. And so you'll see that also that we have a section for eligible providers who wish to make a bulk application on behalf of more than ten services. So this is just to make it a little bit easier so that you don't have to put in separate applications. And there is an option for this as you go, you'll see it in application form. You will just have to provide the total number of services in your bulk application. Hopefully you can see that there on the screen where that option is and the approved provider ID of each of the services as per NQAITS. So this will be a number that starts at SE and is followed by eight numbers. You only need to enter the eight numbers. You don't need to include the SE at the beginning. So what we've also done, and maybe some of you have already seen it, but we've got a short video that we've created which guides you through the actual application form. So if you scan that QR code there, that will take you to the website and there you will see a link to a short form where we actually run you through the application form from start to finish and we give a bit of a guided tour of the application form, if you will, and hopefully that will answer any more of the questions that you might have as you're going through. And I think it's just a handy thing to watch before you go through, through the form and hopefully you find that useful.

MAJA: The next, next one please. So applications are now open. They opened on the 7th of June, June, sorry, February. I'm ahead of myself and will close on the 31st of March. Successful applicants will be notified by 31 May and will receive their funding before 30 June this year. So you can see that on the screen there. Successful applicants will have until the 31st of December 2024 to participate in the health and development check and spend their funding. As I mentioned earlier, the acquittals process will need to be completed by June 2025, and this involves reporting to the department on how your service has spent funding according to the three categories. And remember that it's okay if you're spending slightly different to what has been indicated in your original application, and we encourage all applicants to reach out to the LHD to expressed interest in participating in the program as you are as you go through your application process. And this will just make it more streamlined, hopefully for yourself and for the check to be able to be booked in. So we've got our HDC website there, which you can see on the screen or you can access it using the QR code there and that gives a little bit more information about the checks, some resources we've got on there and also a list of the different LHD’s that are on board so far and their emails and it tells you how to get in contact with your LHD. And if you need, if you have any questions following this webinar or if there's anything you don't want to ask today or if there's anything that comes up, anything at all, you can email that email that you see on the screen. I just want to make it really clear that that is not sort of a big centralised email that will go into the ether. It's our small, dedicated team that will get back to you really quickly with a quick turnaround and we're very happy to answer any questions, set up meetings and really help guide you and assist you through this process. So if your service is in one of the three local health district yet to begin rollout, like I mentioned, that's Northern New South Wales, Northern Sydney and Far West, we're still encouraging, we still encourage you to apply for the grant and like I said before, we'll work with those LHD’s when they come online to ensure that where possible grant recipients can receive the check by the end of 2024. And I think importantly, just make sure everyone knows in the case of extenuating circumstances our team will assess on a case by case basis if a check hasn't been able to be done in 2024 but you have received the funding.