Alicia

Thank you everybody for joining our webinar for the 2025 Health and Development participation Grant. We are going to chat with you for the next 45 minutes. Just about the grant and how you can spend your money. We might just move on to the next slide please.
Excellent. So, good morning, everybody. My name is Alicia Kenyon, and I am currently the acting manager for the Health and Development Check team at the NSW Department of Education. I am joined today by my team as well, and you'll see a couple of faces come up onto the screen as we go through this morning's webinar.
I'd like to begin our meeting today by acknowledging country, so I am calling in today from the land of the Dharug people where I live, work and play.
I'd like to extend my respect to the traditional custodians of the lands that I'm on, but also to the lands that you're all joining from today as well. And I acknowledge that wherever you're dialling in from in NSW, we're joining from Aboriginal land always was and always will be.
I'd like to pay my respects to all of our Aboriginal colleagues that are joining us today as well.
As we gather today and we talk about health and development cheques and we talk about our 2025 grand that can support our littlest learners.
I encourage everybody to keep Aboriginal children and their families at the centre of everything that we do to help children's development, OK.
So thank you all for joining us today. I'm really glad to see so many people have jumped on to hear our webinar today. Congratulations to everybody for receiving a 2025 health and development participation grant. As I said earlier, we're going to go through and just have a look at the different categories of the grant and how we can spend our money.
A little bit of housekeeping before we dive straight in as we go through the content this morning. If you have any questions, you can add them to our Q&A function.
As I said before, our team is here and they're ready to answer questions as we go through. So just pop them into the chat, into the Q&A, sorry, and we will answer them as we go through. If there's anything that you think of after we finish this morning, don't sweat. You can just send us a quick e-mail. The e-mail address will come up on your screen multiple times throughout the morning. So just jot that down. Any questions you have that you want some more information on or anything you think about later, just send us an e-mail.
And we will answer your questions.
OK, so we're here today to discuss how services can best utilise their 2025 grant and we will break it down as we go through into category one, category two and for people that got grants across both categories, if you're unsure which grant which sorry which category your service got a grant from. You should have received this information in your notification of outcome letter and you should have received this via e-mail.
On the 5th of March this year.
If you're not sure, still, after looking at that letter or you can't locate the letter, just send us an e-mail so we can assist you.
We are also going to give you a bit of a brief overview of the rollout of the health and Development check program across the state, how your service can book a visit and what you're reporting requirements will be at the end of this grant process.
OK, so as you can see, there's a slide up on the screen now about our programme. So, we are going to give you now a quick overview of the health and Development check program, so a lot of you probably have heard a bit about this programme already, but we're just going to give you a quick recap and just give you some information about where we're up to. So health and development checks ECEC
Services program is a partnership between NSW Health and the Department of Education, we know that not that many children are missing out on having their four year old check before they go to school, and we know that about two and five children are also starting school developmentally off track, so regular health and development checks give families really important information and crucial insights into how their children are tracking before they start school. And these health and development checks can be found in their blue book.
The health and development check in early childhood education and care builds on the sorry builds on services that already exist already exist.
So parents and carers can access their child's health and development checks from zero to five.
At their local GP at the child's Health and development, sorry, the child and Family health nurse or the local Aboriginal medical service.
The programme aims is to increase the number of children who complete their four year old check.
So that families can access that information that they need to support their child's health and development and seek help when needed before their children start school.
Each local health district across NSW has tailored the program to their capacity and to their community’s needs.
But broadly speaking, this is what a health and development check would look like. So before the health and development check occurs at your service teachers and educators will be asked to support families to complete the required forms, so a consent form and a pre-questionnaire to support families with completing that and then to discuss their visit with children so that they feel prepared and comfortable with what's going to happen on the day of the check.
On the day of the check, the visiting health professionals will conduct the checks in a private room or a private space at your service.
You will need to ensure that a teacher or educator is present at all times and should provide families feedback as to their child's experience throughout the day.
Following on from the checks, we would encourage families to share the results or report with you so that you can best support their child's needs at your service.
You can also ask the local health district for a service summary form and this will provide you with an overview of the key developmental needs of the children in your service.
OK. Just move on to the next slide please.
Thank you very much.
OK, so the health and development check program commenced roll out in September 2023 and it is now available in 14 of our local health districts across NSW with our last local health district kicking off very shortly.
Health professionals from NSW Health, the local health districts will check Children's Health and development.
As you can see on this slide.
The team at NSW Health and our team here at the Department of Education are working hard to support the roll out, so in 2025 you will see us delivering or already delivered things like new and easy information, easy to read information sheets for services for families and we're hoping to do translations of these sheets as well. We have a Culturally Safe Approach Reflective toolkit, which is now online, and we will be having capability uplifts workshops.
We're going to give you a little bit more information about these things as we progress through the webinar this morning because some of these things are these are things that you can use your funding for.
OK, I am going to pass over to Hannah now, who's going to break down the category One, category two and spending requirements. Thanks Hanna.

Hannah

Thank you, Alicia. My name's Hannah. I'm the policy officer in our health and development check team at the Department.
So let me break down the grant for you today.
So in 2025.
We designed the grant to support access to the program and to keep children at the centre of our work, so we're aiming for this grant to support uptake of the HDC program.
Especially for services in lower socioeconomic areas, services with high numbers of culturally and linguistically diverse families and all services with a high number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families, as well as this we aim to increase capability of teachers and educators in services to implement the HDC program and to embed support for children following the check.
Our goal also is to align with our district equity strategies and their capacity to deliver in 2025, we have had 862 successful applicants.
Congratulations to you all.
So these included across the state, not-for-profit community preschools, not-for-profit long daycare services standalone for profit, long daycare services, Multifunctional Aboriginal Children Services, Aboriginal Child and Family Centres and Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations.
Let's have a closer look at these categories.
Yep, ready to go to the next slide.
So in 2025, as you would be aware, we have two categories. So category one on the screen there is $1500 for participation in the HDC program, so that includes relief time and overtime payments for educators and teachers to participate in the program. This might include completing administrative tasks, engaging with NSW health staff, and supporting those follow-up conversations that arise after the check.
Category 2 provides $6000 in funding for capability uplift and educational resources.
The intention for category two is to build capacity of ECEC educators to support Children's Health and developmental needs. So, breaking that down that includes professional learning and workshops on Children's Health and development could include, but is not limited to, department-led workshops, which we will be delivering as part of the health and Development checks program.
Or existing conferences or professional development opportunities across Australia.
Allied health professionals in service to support Children's Health and development let me just put myself on the screen. Sorry, here I am.
So that might include, you know, engaging a health professional to come into the service to observe the service in its as you are on your day-to-day and to suggest opportunities to add additional supports into the program or curriculum.
And that funding could also be used for the purchasing of resources that support children's development we encourage you to think about how that could align with Children's Health and development domains, which we will explain later through this webinar today.
We do just want to note that services receiving category one funding have committed to participating in the program in 2025.
Which includes having the district team delivered those health and development checks for four year olds at their service.
Your local health district will be in contact with you when they are able to offer you a service.
Services who've received category two funding are welcome to participate in the Health and Development Check program, but it will not be a requirement of receiving that funding.
Let's look at category one funding in greater detail.
So category one funding can be used to provide relief time, overtime payments or travel costs for educators and teachers to undertake administrative duties related to the checks, which might include assisting families to complete consent forms, meeting with district staff the distribution of reports to families after the check or providing additional support to children during the check.
We just want to make clear funding cannot be used for non HDC program related activities with this category one funding.
So this might so funding cannot be used for things like increasing ratios to provide one-on-one support.
To complete other administrative duties.
So yeah, all working with an individual child. The intention is to support the whole cohort of 4 year old children in receiving those health and development checks.
Services do not need to arrange or pay for their own health professionals to provide the checks the local health district teams will do this for you.
Let's look at category two. So as I mentioned before, we can breakdown category 2 into 3 sub categories so that is ECE, teacher and educator professional development so that covers trouble and relief time costs to enable educators and teachers to attend health and development, check workshops and engage with training resources or related professional learning.
To be engaging allied health professionals, so that includes bringing in an allied health worker or other professionals to support Children's Health and development by providing educators and teachers with professional development, specialised education programs or support to embed suitable cohort wide strategies 2 C.
Is purchasing resources for the program so that includes arranging the provision of resources to support children's development and, as I've already mentioned, resources will need to support cohort-wide engagement.
Let's go to the next slide.
So category two focuses on upscaling educators and teachers in relation to the HDC program, such as preparing to take part of the program or building capacity to support children, support Children's Health and development following a HDC visit.
To determine what may be included under the term health and development, we encourage you to consider the components of the health and development checks program, which includes listening and talking skills, social skills and behaviour, gross and fine motor skills, learning, thinking and problem solving skills and how children's bodies are growing, such as their height, weight and teeth development.
We encourage you to take a look at the Blue Book in particular, the four year old cheque, so that is the basis for the HDC Program in services as delivered by the local health district, so that is forms a great starting point when thinking about how you may wish to use the grant funding in your service.
Let's go to the next slide.
We thought it might prove useful to provide some really tangible examples for how to use the funding. I know that these are merely ideas and is not an exhaustive list you know your service, best, please lean on your experience and your knowledge of the children in your service when choosing how to expend the grant funding. So here are some examples for you, number 1.
Would be to arrange for allied health professionals to build educator skills so consider engaging a relevant external provider, such as an allied health professional, to facilitate role modelling and training support to educators and teachers in order to embed strategies into everyday practice and into programs delivered within the service.
Number 2.
Attend conferences related to early childhood development. An example of a conference you might wish to look into might be the annual ECA conference there are a range of conferences past just that conference to look into.
When deciding what conference or workshop you might consider engaging with, have a close look at the agenda and consider what learnings you could bring back to your service that would support health and development throughout the service as a whole.
Number 3 engage with professional learning, courses, so consider engaging an online or in person training workshops related to supporting children's development, this might include talking, listening, problem solving skills, social skills and behaviour as per the blue book that we looked at earlier.
We've got a couple of tangible examples on the screen, and I also note that we will the team has developed a recommended professional learning list which we will link in the chat.
Number 4 would be engage in training delivered by your local health district. Local health districts are regularly delivering training and PL in their areas. We encourage you to reach out to the team and see what they have on offer. A great example.
Would be.
We we've got a great example in northern Sydney Local health district.
They deliver training related to healthy eating and physical activity.
Which is their small bites, big steps, training so that's something to look into there’s some great opportunities across the state.
Number 5 engage with the department's professional learning and tools, which is related to the health and development checks program Alicia mentioned that before, but we will also go into further detail shortly our Connect and Communicate toolkit and our Culturally Safe Approach toolkit.
Let's have a quick look at the next slide. So as I've already mentioned, we have published a list of recommended professional learning it's available through the QR code and we'll drop a link into the chat this list is always being updated as new information comes to light so we will make sure we provide updates as we are aware of new learning opportunities.
Just to note, the list is not exhaustive, you may choose to use funding for other professional learning and development courses, conferences, or workshops, provided that they are linked to and are relevant to supporting Children's Health and development, and the HDC program.
Professional learning can be completed at any time so long as the funds are spent before the 31st of December 2025.
We encourage you to use funding to attend our health and development workshops and engage with the department's professional learning materials related to health and development but again, we also encourage you to consider what works best for your service.
And let's look at the next slide for some more examples as mentioned before, category two can also be used to purchase resources that support children's development. I've listed some examples on the screen there, but I'll just run through some examples here now so examples of resources to assist with children's childhood health and development might include so social, emotional books, self-regulation, teaching resources, role play resources and books, visuals and games to support communication development. You might also consider books to engage in shared reading, which foster language development or books on topics such as emotions to support children to develop their social skills. You might also consider equipment purchasing equipment that supports children's social skills and behaviour such as purchasing resources in order to set up a quiet space for children to visit when they need time away from the group.
You might consider creating visuals that support transitions between routines in order to support children's regulation and socio social emotional development, healthy eating resources, or oral health books.
Such as a toothbrushing model, posters for learning about healthy eating and toothbrushing and role play resources such as food models might also be in consideration for your service.
Gross motor equipment can be purchased such as climbing frames or stepping stones for children's physical development. You might consider purchasing an edible of not purchasing or setting up. Sorry, an edible garden which allow children to learn about different foods and might lead on to additional opportunities, such as assisting in food preparation and developing a positive attitude towards food.
You may also choose to create classroom visuals that encourage an inclusive environment for children with hearing impairments or rearrange your learning environments to reduce hazards and enhance accessibility for those hearing or vision impaired.
As I've popped on the screen there again, you know your service best, so this is not an exhaustive list and we encourage you to consider what might work best in your service and for your cohort of four year old children?
Let's look at the next section, so the boring stuff, I suppose, but the important stuff.
If we go to the next slide, I'll just run through some reporting requirements for the grant, so approve requirements, approved providers are required. Sorry to comply with all financial and data collection reporting and acquittal requirements which are outlined in the program guidelines.
Approved providers must undertake a formal acquittal process by June 2026.
With forms being released in May 2026 through ECCMS, all of that information will be provided at the time for you to be aware of. The acquittal process includes completing a statement which includes reporting on how the funding has been spent approved providers may also be audited from time to time.
This could be part of the department's annual audit or to confirm the accuracy of data provided in an applicant's statement. Therefore, we just kindly ask that relevant records are retained by providers for the purpose of the department undertaking reviews so there's just some information on the screen there, which is also available in the program guidelines for you.
Let's go to the next section. I'm going pass now to my colleague Charlie to talk through our capability uplift activities and tools.
Thank you.

Charlie

Right. Thank you, Hannah. Hi everyone. My name is Charlie. I'm an assistant policy officer with the health and dev checks team here at education.
Could we go to the next slide, please? All right, we're going start with the culturally safe approach. So, the Culturally Safe Approach for HDC Toolkit was created to help ensure that HDC program remains culturally safe and respectful. It was designed based on feedback from stakeholders who raised three main points: one the support for Aboriginal children and families ensuring their needs are met in an inclusive way.
Two respecting cultural identity, making sure families, cultural practises and values are honoured, and three, adaptability, ensuring the approach works for different communities if each one is unique. The toolkit offers early childhood services practical ideas to create culturally safe environments and meet the cultural needs of families. It aligns with the Early Years Learning Framework and the National Quality Standards, showing that cultural safety is an important part of quality education I think Hannah has just put the link to the toolkit in the chat. Thank you, Hannah.
So, ensure the toolkit helps services reflect on and improve their approach to be more inclusive, safe and respectful for Aboriginal children and their families before, during and after the health and development check process. So, I would encourage all of you to check out the toolkit and as Hannah said, you can use your funding under category two to engage with the relevant professional learning. Can we go to the next slide, please?
Thank you. So, the Brighter Beginnings Connect and Communicate toolkit has been designed to address a key need for greater speech and language support in the year before school.
Children facing communication difficulties in early childhood are more likely to have ongoing challenges with tasks such as reading, writing, and spelling, as well as challenges with behaviour and maintaining relationships. Early detection and intervention are key to reducing the impact of these difficulties and supporting all children to thrive. For this tool Kit has been designed to be used across the year with short, bite sized pieces of information and strategies to engage with each week.
Each topic includes a theory section providing you with relevant information and evidence-based strategies followed by a practical section to put those strategies into practise. Appendices are provided throughout with different resources you can use within your practise, such as posters, visual routines and games. A summary of each topic is provided as a family fact sheet which you might like to send out to families as part of your newsletter or regular updates. The toolkit also includes a reflective workbook with tasks embedded throughout the topics that provide a space for engaging in deep thinking about pedagogy and practise and critically, reflecting individually and with peers on the learning within the toolkit to generate new ideas and goals, completion of the workbook can also be logged as professional development hours. We are going to have more information on the toolkit at its release very, very soon. So please keep an eye on your inboxes because we'll be sending emails out when that is ready. We go to the next slide, please. Thank you to support the roll out of the connect and communicate toolkit and the culturally safe approach, we'll be delivering workshops across the state in partnership with local health districts, some of you on the call may have attended our first workshop in Dubbo in November last year if that was you hello, this year, we will be visiting 8 LHDs from June to September. We're aiming to visit each LHD by the end of June 2026. The all-day workshops are designed for educational leaders and room leaders and will include an overview of how the HDC Program operates in your district.
A session on typical communication development for four year old children.
Introduction to the culturally safe approach and an opportunity for discussion and reflection on culturally safe practises within the service. An introduction to the Connecting Communicate Toolkit and an interactive let's play session where attendees can explore and practise some of the strategies and experiences in the toolkit with support from speech pathologists and opportunities for discussion, reflection and networking with other services in your local health district.
The services in our participating LHDs will receive invitations to register their interest in attending soon, so please keep an eye on your inbox and again, the department will notify all services of the release of the toolkit via e-mail.
I'm now going to hand back to Alicia.

Alicia

OK, thank you, Charlie.
OK, so now we're going to have a little bit of a look at what the next steps are.
Awesome. OK. So, we have 15 local health districts, as we said earlier and if you're not sure which local health district your service falls in, you can go onto the interactive LHD map and it will be able to tell you, you can just pop your address in and it tells you which LHC you're in. So, Hannah has just added to the website to the chat for us, but it's also there's a QR code on the screen too, if you want to use that just to pop in and have a look.
Let's go to the next slide, please. Thank you so much. So, as Hannah mentioned earlier, participation in the programme is a requirement when you receive category one funding only. If you received category one funding, your local health district will contact your service to let you know when they're able to offer you the program and they will work with you to find a convenient time for them to come to your service and provide 4 year olds with health and development checks. As we've said before as well, you do not need to arrange your own health professionals to do this NSW Health your local health district will provide the health and development checks for the children at your service.
If you didn't receive category one funding, your service is still eligible to participate in the program and we encourage you to register your interest with your local health district.
They will contact you when they have availability to provide you a service.
Emails for all of the local health districts can be found on our website, and one of my lovely team, thank you. I'm putting that in the chat for you right now.
So you can go on to this website and there is a list down the bottom of all of the LH Ds find the one that you're in and send them an e-mail to express your interest.
If you have any concerns about booking a checks or you have further questions around that, please feel free to e-mail us at earlychildhooddevelopment@det.nsw.edu.au
OK, just go to the next slide. Thank you. Just a little bit of a timeline for everybody. So, all services should have received the notification letter, and the money should be in your account. If you're a public preschool, that money will be coming shortly.
Services have until the end of December, so the 31st of December to spend their funds in whatever category they received funding for. But if you receive category one, you also have until the end of December, so the 31^st to have a visit completed by your local health district.
And as mentioned earlier by Hannah, you will have until the end of June 2026 to complete your financial reporting or your acquittals process.
OK.
Next slide. So, this is next steps for services if you need more information. This is the slide you need to look back at. So if you want more information about the programme itself, that is the first website and the first QR code on the slide, that will give you an overview of what the programme is and your local health districts.
We encourage all services to re-read the program guidelines, the web page and QR code in the middle will take you to this document if you haven't engaged with this document, please do it's got lots of helpful information in it.
And if you have more questions, please visit our FAQ page that is the one on the right-hand side of the screen and you, there's lots of extra information in there about the 2025 grant.
After you visited all these three sites, read the documents if you still have questions, we are here to help, so please don't hesitate in sending us an e-mail and we will reply to you and provide you with the information that you need. OK. So, I just wanted to say thank you to everybody for joining our webinar this morning. We really hope that we have provided you with some additional information about how to effectively spend your 2025 grant and again don't hesitate to contact us if you need more information. We're more than happy to help.
I think we're keeping up with answering all the questions in the Q&A. My team just give me a quick nod.
Yeah. OK. So, we might just say goodbye and again if you have any questions, just get in contact. Thanks so much everybody.

[End of transcript]

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.