[Video opens and screen reads 'AEDC NSW post data release drop-in session']

Mary Taiwo

Hi everyone. Welcome to today's session. I'm sorry for starting just a few minutes late. My computer was just acting up a bit. Just to introduce myself, my name is Mary Taiwo and I'm AEDC New South Wales State Coordinator. So, part of my role is to manage the AEDC here in New South Wales, and there's an equivalent of my role in all the other states across Australia.

I'll start by acknowledging that I'm joining this meeting from the land of the Baramadagal people, Darug nation here in Parramatta. I acknowledge Aboriginal Elders past, present, and those emerging and their contributions to this beautiful country in the past, their contributions now, and also ongoing contributions going into the future.

So, I'll just also start with an Acknowledgement of Country by one of our public preschools, by children from one of our public preschools.

Child 1

We at Camdenville Preschool pay respect to the Gadigal people.

Child group

People who are sharing this land for thousands of years.

Pair of children

We say thank you to the Elders for sharing this land on which we learn and play.

Child 2

Thank you to the Elders.

Child 3

Thank you.

Child group

We promise to look after it, the bush, the animals, and the people too.

Mary Taiwo

Beautifully said there by those children. I will move on to the next slide. So, I've introduced myself as Mary, and today I'm just going to talk a little bit about the AEDC data, especially that we have new data set that have just been published just over a week ago. So, part of this session is that you have a better understanding of the AEDC data, how it's collected, and also what it focuses on.

And then I'll talk a bit about how you can access the data and how you can engage with the data at the community level or at the school level. Also, what's the value of the data? How we can inform practice planning in different contexts. But I know this session is for Early Childhood educators, so some of my examples might actually focus within that in terms of reflecting within your context of practice.

And then I'm going to talk a bit about some of the resources we already have available for you to access, and then we'll have the opportunity to talk about data if you have questions at the end. So, the AEDC data is a nationwide population census, and it measures students development in five key domains.

As you can see on the screen there. It looks at physical health and wellbeing, social competence, emotional maturity, language, and cognitive skills. These are very school-based skills, and then communication skills and general knowledge. So, each of these domains have subdomain indicators, which are those indicators below, but then it just gives a sense of where the child is after the transition into to school.

We also have available the domain guides if you do want to download it from our website. AEDC NSW webpage. So, moving on to the next slide. The data collection occur once in three years, and it's a national project, so all states are involved, all schools are invited to participate in the collection regardless of the sector.

So, independent schools, Catholic schools, and government schools as public schools are invited to be part of it. So, we'd like the last collection, which is the results we're going to talk about today, was completed in Term 2, 2024, just about a year ago. But we've had previous collections over the years, as you can see there.

So, this data is the sixth contact point where we've collected the data. Each of the AEDC instrument has about a hundred questions, where kindergarten teachers respond to about each child. So, it takes about 20 minutes and part of the AEDC process is that the Australian Government pays for teachers to take time off class so that they can actually reflect and respond to the question based on their knowledge and observation.

Remember, the data collection happens in Term 2, so the teacher would've had a chance to know the child and their context a little bit more. The instrument is, well, it has been validated as to be able to, for Aboriginal children to be part of the AEDC data collection. There's a lot of analysis and consultation that did occur before the AEDC comments.

And over time we do carry ongoing consultation to ensure it's appropriate. In New South Wales, we had over 90,000 children participate in 2024, so that's 94.5% of the children enroll in kindergarten in 2024 and we had over 2000 schools participate in the AEDC collection. So you can see that they were all schools from different sectors depending on the size of the sector.

That's where the number of schools we had over 5,400 kindergarten teachers complete the collection for each child in their class. So, they each had the time to reflect on it and complete it. So, the outcome we're seeing is a, will I say a collective response from teachers and not just the perspective of a few teachers.

So, just to give a bit of a breakdown with each of those domains. Sometimes one of the questions I get asked often is, well, what do the questions look like? And who wrote the questions and how do we know they're actually measuring? So, just to give a bit of a snapshot, some of the questions, for example, in terms of physical health and wellbeing there are a couple of questions, but this is just one or two from each domain is asking the question, is the child independent in toileting habits?

Remember, the child has transitioned into school by the time this is completed. Does the child arrive to school hungry? Emotional maturity. Does this child try to help someone who has been hurt? Like what's their response? And is the child interested in reading, inquisitive or curious about the meaning of printed materials?

So, this is around the language and cognitive skills. So, these are just questions that kind of give a sense. So, remember I said the instrument has about a hundred questions? So, just a few examples of some of the questions the teacher respond to. Yes, no, sometimes they're allowed to say, I don't know or if they're not sure.

Well, some of the responses are, do they do it always, sometimes, or they never do it? So it depends on how the question is worded that the teachers respond. So, being that they look at the five domains of early childhood development, it's the AEDC tells you about your context broadly. And in a way, there's been a lot of work that has linked the AEDC to the EYLF and the NQS.

We wouldn't go deep into that. We have resources on that on our webpage, but it gives a better understanding of what has happened, what are the child's strengths, what are their needs, and how can we effectively respond to that? Is also a good way to examine if you've had a program. So, let's say for example, a service had implemented a program between 2021 to 2023, for example, and the kids have transitioned into school in 2024. It'd be nice to know if you've seen any improvement, if you're targeting a specific domain or all of the domains to see if there has been a change in the outcomes for children.

So again, another advantage that AEDC now gives us is the longitudinal value. So even though different cohorts have been measured over time, the way the analysis is completed is been weighed in a way that to ensure that actually the measure is consistent over the years and it gives a trend. So, if you can look at this graphs here, you can see that. You can see over the years what's happening.

This is an example of a community report that I've just taken a snippet from, and also it gives within the domain or with the summary indicators, are they making progress? Are they going backward? What's happening? So, it's a good idea to know what's been happening in the first 2000 days for children over time as a community, as a society, or even as a nation.

There are factors that play a part in terms of positive or negative outcomes. I'm sure you're all aware of that, and for AEDC, for example, even something as little as contact with Child Protection Services, if that has happened for a child before the age of five, it's an indicator that the child might be vulnerable in at least one of the AEDC domains.

So even if it's just a phone call, someone raising concern about the wellbeing of a child that has been found that it actually has some coalition with the child's AEDC outcome. So, it kind of gives us an indication of what might be happening for the child.

So, the AEDC also has a predictive value. So, if you work with schools too, for schools it's a good way to know, okay, how can we support the children going forward? So, there's been a lot of work done by AERO and also by the kids in Students Australia to link the AEDC with some future outcomes.

So for example, in NAPLAN Year 3, NAPLAN, Year 5, and even some of the other academic assessments that happen later on in along the schooling years is been found that if a child is already vulnerable in one of the AEDC domains and some more, for example, the language and cognitive skills, then actually there is an indication that this is going to be reflected in other ongoing learning for the child across the school years.

So I wouldn't go deep into this because this audience is the early childhood sector, broadly, but there is those research, you can actually have a look, and even the New South Wales Child Development study, they actually have done a long study where they looked at children from 2009 up until now and to see what are some of the mental health and wellbeing outcomes for children and if that has, was already been indicated in their AEDC outcomes years before.

So, they found that there's been a link with, especially with, emotional maturity and social competence and some of the life outcomes for children. So how best to engage with the AEDC, in terms of interpreting your data, we know that services have a lot of information already based on your ongoing interaction with the children.

So don't look at the AEDC in isolation. I'll say look at the AEDC alongside every other formative and ongoing assessment information that you have. Also looking at it with other data that you have about the community. It could be the local council data or ABS census data. Looking at the demographic within your community, some of that, you know, you've observed, you've seen it already, and then also whatever data you have access to as a service, looking at that and trying to build more context around the AEDC. Then looking beyond the obvious, in looking at your AEDC community or if you have access to a school data, or even at the state level, looking beyond the obvious. So, for example, are children being impacted maybe in emotional maturity?

I'm thinking beyond that, or maybe they just need a bit more training to know how to self-regulate. It might be that there might be other family factors, other things happening that is actually playing out in those domain outcomes. So, I'll encourage you to look beyond the obvious as you delve into your data.

So, in terms of accessing the AEDC report, so the community profile, which is available for early childhood services, this gives you an idea, it's almost at a local council level that's available on the AEDC national webpage, and I think the link might go into the chart now or maybe soon.

It gives you an idea. So, if you go on the data explorer, you just get to type in the name of your community. So, let's say for example, Parramatta, because the Department of Education is in Parramatta, so you type Parramatta, it comes up and then you're able to download it. I'll show that very soon in the next slide. The State and National report is available for you to download on the AEDC national webpage.

If you work closely with the school, so schools have access to the AEDC profile. They have a contact person that oversees the AEDC in the school, but you can always talk to the principal or the deputy principal. They do have access as a PDF document. They all receive that. If they had more than six students that completed the collection within the school or they do have it on Scout.

So, some schools you might not be able to have access to the Scout for the school, but they can actually have a look. And when you're having those conversations, they are able to explain. So AEDC on Scout is only available for Public schools, so the Department of Education schools, but if you're working with a school from another sector, they do have a report that was provided as a PDF document so they can share that with you.

The principal is kind of their approver to share that with you. So, speaking about the community level data, once you go on the AEDC national webpage, you're going to see something called Community Data Explorer, and you can just type in the name of your community. So, I've used Parramatta as an example, and there it comes.

It gives you a quick overview of that community, that local council, and then you can look at tables, maps, or graphs. But I will strongly recommend you download the PDF or the Word document here that is shown on my screen. If you download that, it gives you a detailed report so it looks something like this.

It gives you a proper and a detailed breakdown of the community, the number of children, the access to preschool education that they've had, what percentage of them have had access, and there's more information. So, the website gives you a high level summary, but if you download the PDF, and we'll go through some of the pages on the PDF.

So again, like I said, if you want to work, if you work closely with a school, I'm sure all of you do work closely with schools do ask them for their school level report, because that gives you an insight into the children, especially if you have a particular school that most of the children from your service transition into, I think it's worth looking at the AEDC outcomes in that school. To have a better sense of it.

So, within the PDF, like I said, I will strongly recommend downloading the community report. It gives you the trends in each of the five AEDC domains. As you can see, this is an example and I've just chosen a random community here.

So, it gives you for physical health and wellbeing, social competence, emotional maturity. The green lines, as you can see, is the percentage of children who are on track, those students who are, their development and progress is as expected after the transitioning into school. The yellow or the amber line, gives you an idea of the percentage of children who are at risk. So those children, they're not really where they ought to be, but they are at risk. They're not quite vulnerable yet. So, this might be like a quick group. If you see the percentage of children at risk, they might be an easy group to target so that they can actually come up to be on track, because if they are not supported, then they could go back to be more vulnerable.

And the red line is a percentage of children who are vulnerable. So, this gives an idea of how that is tracking on each of the domains. So, another information available in the PDF, once you download that at your community level, it gives you a bit of a breakdown. As you can see here, the number of children measure the number of schools that participated in that community.

So again, remember I said within the local council, and it also includes schools from all sectors. So, it's a summary level. Okay, in 2024, there were 25 schools in this community report. In this community that participated in the AEDC, the number of teachers are contributed to the result. Again, like I said, the AEDC is not a few teachers, all kindergarten teachers participate, so it just gives you a sense like, how many teachers assess the children the average age of the children in that community that participated, and a bit of breakdown here. How many First Nations children are in that community? What percentage of the children were born in another country? The percentage of children with English as a second language.

Again, all of these is helpful to, when you're looking at the data, you're able to put it in context like what's happening? Have we had more migrant families coming into the community? And that might be impacting one particular domain for a combination of reasons. Have we had more children with English as a second language that might impact a particular domain for a combination of reasons.

So just understanding that at the back of your mind and what has changed over time. Are we seeing a shift in a particular group or a particular kind of demographic coming into the community that might help you understand what might be happening with your data. So, part of the PDF community level report that you have and also if you are from a school, within the school, the school report basically replicates what the community level profile shows.

So, if you're looking at the school report, the same information is available, however, it's the information for children who are enrolled in that school. So if, for example, I'm looking at the report from Parramatta, not public school, just as an example, the children that were enrolled in Parramatta, not public school in 2024, the data about them will be in that report.

But if I'm looking at the Parramatta council community report, all the children that have their home address as Parramatta will be reflected. So regardless of where the child is schooling, if for whatever reason they're schooling in Blacktown or they're schooling somewhere else, their community data will be captured within Parramatta because that's where they live and potentially access services, but their school report will be reported at their school.

So, you can see an example, what happens in the PDF document. It also gives you a bit of a breakdown and context. As I said, look at your data in context. What's happening in this community? What percentage of children are on track? Are we making improvement? Like for instance in this, there've been a big improvement compared to New South Wales.

So, these are the state outcomes, what's happening in New South Wales? And then what's happening nationally? So looking at this and seeing the context and this community, they're on track and it seem like they're on track even ahead of what's happening, and New South Wales are nationally, so maybe you wouldn't focus on physical health and wellbeing.

There might be another domain that actually the percentage of children on track is less than the national average. So then you'll be like, okay, maybe we need to up our game in this particular domain. So the other part of what is also important to look out for is the percentage and the numbers.

So if, for example, 10% of 500 children is not the same as 10% of 50 children within a community. So, looking at the scale of it just to understand what numbers are we talking about and how might we target our support and intervention. Part of the AEDC is that there's also what we call the summary indicators.

And the summary indicators actually gives you the percentage of children, who are developmentally vulnerable on one or more domain, or those who are vulnerable on two or more domains, and the percentage of children who are on track on all the five domains. So, I'll explain that a bit. Percentage of children who are developmentally vulnerable in one or more domain basically tells us that, for example, in this community, in 2024, 17% of the children are vulnerable in at least one of the five AEDC domain.

They could be vulnerable in all five, but we know that at least 70% have one domain where the other, it doesn't matter the domain, at least one area where they probably need to be supported in and then vulnerable on two or more domain is like 9.8% of the children in this community are vulnerable in at least two of the AEDC domains.

So again, it gives us a scale of, do we respond? Do we have more children vulnerable in one domain? Yes, and there may be less. So, look at what's happening in your community. About half, maybe not quite half of it, but then when you look in terms of percentage there about half of that are vulnerable too.

So at least two of the AEDC domains, they are vulnerable. They could be vulnerable in all five. We know that at least in two of those areas, about 10% of the children are vulnerable. Looking at track on five is a percentage of children. So, this is a strength-based indicator. The percentage of children who are on track on all the five AEDC domains.

So, they are growth and development is progressing as expected by the time they transition into school already. So, in this community, 65% of the children in that community were on track. So that's good. That's a good thing because that's a big number. But then we shouldn't lose sight of the remaining percentage, which said 5% that are actually vulnerable in at least one or in two of the AEDC domains.

So just this gives an idea of, I think this is useful if you're trying to see is this a big problem or is it just a few children that are affected and how can we target, do we just target a big group or do we kind of focus on our intervention? Again, it gives you that trend over time.

You can see, well, we made progress, or there was a bit of a decline, and now we're making progress. If we have more children on track, then less children will be vulnerable either on one or more, or two or more domains. So, I've spoken about this already. Also, within each of the domains, there will be a page and a community report that gives you that breakdown.

Again, look at the numbers. If you like the graphs, you can look at the graphs, but the numbers behind it are also provided. How many children are we talking about? What's the percentage in that sense? What percentage of children are at risk and what percentage are vulnerable? And the numbers. So, it's important to look at the numbers because some communities are bigger than others.

So as an early childhood services, what might be helpful is on the latter pages of the community level report, there is also a bit of a breakdown. So, as I've used Paramatta as an example, Paramatta is a big local council and there are lots of suburbs in it. But if you look within this, for example, that there's a bit of a breakdown.

So if you look at, let's say if we're going to work you out, just continue using Parramatta as an example, there will be not Parramatta, there'll be Rosehill, there'll be those little suburbs that are within Parramatta. But it gives you the advantage of this is, we've seen the community level report, but when we look closely, we can actually see that, are all the suburbs within Parramatta impacted equally, or are some more impacted than others?

So, this is helpful for your service. If, let's say, for example, in this instance, most of the kids that come to your service actually live in Richmond Valley as an example, you can actually look at what's the trend, what's happening here?

Or if you have a combination of two suburbs that, what's happening and how likely we adjust what we're doing or what kind of sub-program do we want to plan? Because most of our children are coming. So even though the community is doing well broadly, we can actually see in the detail that maybe the children within our suburb are impacted for one reason or the other more.

So, I think this is the reason why we came today, to understand what the 2024 data is saying for us, for New South Wales. So, one of the questions that we do ask as part of the AEDC collection is a percentage of children who do have special needs and that at the time of transitioning to school, they already have an assessment and they're receiving the support they need.

So as you can see, this is the dotted line here, and there's been an increase since 2018, we've seen a bit of an increase in the percentage of children identified as having a special need or a disability. And the teachers are seeing here that, yeah, we know it, we have the assessment. They've been diagnosed, they have an official assessment.

So, they're getting the support. But the other thing to also look into, which is part of that question, is we ask the teacher is, okay, if the teacher says, no, the child doesn't have an assessed disability, then the next question is, do you think based on your observation of the child in the past, by the time they completed a collection, they would've interacted with the child for a few months?

So, you can see that we've seen an increase in the percentage of children that teachers are saying, they don't have an assessment, an official assessment, but we do think they need an assessment because something else is impacting on their learning and they don't have the support they need. So, there's been a significant shift and increase between 2018 and in 2024 up to 18%.

Again, this is data for New South Wales. That data is available for your community if you're looking at your community report in the PDF document. And similar, this trend is similar to what we've seen nationally, so it's not unique to New South Wales. So, it might be worth actually thinking what is happening here?

Do we need to actually refer children early on so they get their assessment and the support they need before the transition to school, otherwise in school no one knows exactly what's happening for them. So that's a high percentage, 18%. Some of the questions we ask is on transition to school, and one is, is a child making good progress?

Again, this is based on the teacher's observation. The teacher has interacted with the child after a few months and they're sharing their observation. Is a child making good progress in terms of adapting to school. High percentages, but I know two of the other response is if it's not true or if the teacher is not sure.

We've seen a slight increases in that, and that information is not on this slide, but for the most of it we have a good percentage of families engaged. We did have a bit of a decline if you look at this. We've had a bit of a decline over time in the percentage of children that the teachers think they're read to regularly.

So that's something to also look out for in your community report. We've seen a steady decline. So, it's like parents too busy to read for their children at home? Or the child has transitioned into school and the parents think, okay, the teachers have taken over so we don't have to do that reading again. And that's important and in that sense to understand what's happening in that community.

Some of the summary indicators, so this is at the state level, New South Wales. You'll have the same information for your community level is a percentage of children who are on track on all five AEDC domains and also development vulnerability on one or more, or two or more domains.

As you can see here, the percentage of children on track, we've also had a bit of a decline in between since 2018. We had a bit of an increase. We made some progress, and then we had a dip and got it to the peak in 2018, and we've seen a decline from 55.5 to 54.2%. So basically, it's saying that more children are transitioning to school, but in terms of their all round development, they're not where they ought to be based on the AEDC domains.

So, the other side of that is that if there is a decline in the percentage of children on track, on all five domains, then increase in terms of the children who are developmentally vulnerable. We did not see a big shift because our decline was a little bit will I say less than other states. But if you look at this in perspective, it looks like in 2024, we have 21.8% of children who are developmentally vulnerable in one or more domain, which is a little bit more than where we were at in 2009.

Similar to the children, passage of children, developmentally vulnerable in two or more domains, we've had like an increase compared to where we were in 2009 when the AEDC was first collected. So, I think this gives us a lot to think about, like what exactly is happening for children and why are we seeing that we are going backward instead of moving forward and making progress.

We did make progress a bit, but then now we're seeing an increase instead of going backward. Instead of going forward, it looks like we're going backward at the state level. Again, look at what this is for your community. So just to give a bit of an overview, I wouldn't talk about the domains.

At the state level, we've seen a bit of shift more with social competence and emotional maturity. That's where we've seen a bit of decline in the percentage of children who are on track have AEDC domains and then an increase, especially emotional maturity in the percentage of children who are vulnerable.

Similar, the language and cognitive skills has seen a big decline since 2018. We've seen the decline, the percentage of children who are on track and then going down is like that. Decline means we've had more children who are at risks in the language and cognitive skills, which is literacy, numeracy, and school-based knowledge.

Communication skills and general knowledge was also, we've seen a decline the percentage of children who are on track. So again, I'll say don't feel too overwhelmed by all of these. It's just for us to look back and actually looking at your community data, what's happening. It might be that not all the domains are in are impacted in your community, but then how can we respond to it?

And even if it feels you can't respond to all, what's the one thing that you can do to any one of the domains? So just to give a bit of a breakdown. So, like I said earlier on in my second slide, each domain has subdomain indicators and those kind of, it gives a bit of a breakdown. The series of questions that teachers answer feed into this subdomain indicators so we can actually drill a bit down to see where exactly children are impacted.

And if you look at these lines, are the percentage of children vulnerable in the subdomain indicators for emotional maturity? The biggest shift we've seen is anxious and fearful behaviour. We've seen an increase between 2021 and 2024, so increase in the percentage of children who are vulnerable in the sense that we're seeing more anxiety and fearful behaviour, and then hyperactive and inattentive behaviour also has had a significant jump.

So, if you look at emotional maturity as a whole, it's actually going a step further to say, okay, what exactly is happening? And is that anxious, fearful behaviour, hyperactive and inattentive behaviour. And I know some of you probably have observed this already from your anecdotal evidence, so this is probably giving you that, okay yeah, something we need to actually respond in a particular way.

I'll go to language and cognitive skills against school-based skills. In this one, we actually saw an increase in vulnerability in advanced literacy, so it jumped from 6% to 8.1%. So that's pretty significant. And then how can we support children within this domain to ensure that they're actually having those advanced literacy skills that they need after transitioning to school?

So, I'll just talk a bit about some equity, some of the priority groups or the equity groups. I know most people are aware of this being on track on five on for First Nations children, and this is a closing the gap target one of the indicators for the Early Years Outcomes target four is increasing the percentage of Aboriginal children who are on track on five AEDC domains.

Unfortunately, we had a bit of a decline. Again, we did see a bit of a decline in 2021, but then it's gone and we definitely want to shift it in the other direction. So thinking about your service, do you have First Nations children enrolled and how can we support the community as a whole to ensure that more children are on track on all five AEDC domains?

So, I wouldn't go much into the detail domain for each of the activity groups, but we also saw that it's a similar trend. There was a bit of drop in percentage of children on track in emotional maturity. And also in language and cognitive skills. So, this is for First Nations children, the domains that were most impacted and had a decline in the percentage of children on track in all the five AEDC domains.

So that's a bit similar to what we saw for all children in New South Wales. Again, a lot of this is also similar to the trends across the country across Australia with other states, but it kind of varies with different domains. But for the most of it, emotional maturity, language and cognitive skills were impacted.

So, looking about your location in terms of location, we did see that all children in all, regardless of where they live, there was a bit of decline in the percentage of children on track. So, both the least disadvantage and the most disadvantage areas we saw a bit of decline. So, I guess those are some of the questions we're asking ourselves, like it looks beyond, there are other factors at play here. We know, we do acknowledge that we did have COVID-19, and there are other things that kind of impacted us as society as a whole, but I think the 2024 data also is giving us a lot of prompts to think about and consider all those factors that are impacting early childhood development.

So, we did see a decline in the percentage of children who are on track on all five domains regardless of where they live.

In terms of children with language background other than English, again, it's a similar story. We've seen a decline if the child has only English as their language, but then even if they've got another language background, we saw a decline, the percentage of children on track.

So again, all the factors at play seem to be impacting all children in different ways. So, part of what we're kind of beginning to reflect on, and I think what you can reflect on as you look at your community level data is what exactly are the factors and how can we provide that early intervention.

How can we support children? How can we plan our programs so that we're actually responding to what the data is telling us? Because we've had a few shifts as a society, so it might be that the things that we are doing before that were effective, we need to rethink them and actually work in a way that the next set of children that will go through school and by 2027 we might see a shift in a positive direction in New South Wales AEDC data.

So I will stop soon, and just to share that we do have a lot of professional learning. If you do feel you want to know more about the AEDC. S,o the micro learning professional course that we have actually unpacks what it means for you as an early childhood educator, how you can use it, how you can link it to what you already do within the Early Years Learning Framework or in terms of some of things you do around improving quality. So just kind of continue to do what you're doing, but how can we even make it better? How can we improve on that and how can we adapt to what we're doing? We do have some case studies of services that have used the AEDC and developed specific initiatives that they've used.

So, if you want to look at that, and also you can always, we have the other like resources, the domain guides are available. Some of those links would've gone into the chat already. But you can always reach out if you're looking at your community level data and you really want to unpack it.

We have limited time, so I've done it at a state level, but when you look at your community data, you can always either reach out by email or calling and kind of asking questions.

And that's some support that we available to provide for you in the sense of talking you through what it means for you, your service, and your context.

[End of transcript]

Narrator

The AEDC is a nationwide census of early childhood development in Australia, and the sixth AEDC data collection will take place in your school in Term 2, 2024, between the 1st of May to the 5th of July. The AEDC collects data about 5 key areas of child development known as domains, including physical health and wellbeing, social competence, emotional maturity, language and cognitive skills, school-based, communication skills, and general knowledge. This video provides a general overview of the 6 key stages in data collection.

Stage one, review the information. A pack will be posted to all primary school principals in March 2024. The pack will contain a welcome letter with the activation code, the AEDC 2024 calendar, a summary of the key steps for participation, and a fact sheet about the AEDC. The AEDC welcome letter contains information to activate the collection for your school. If your school has not received your welcome letter and activation code by the end of March 2024, please contact the AEDC help desk on 1800-092-548 or call your local New South Wales AEDC State Coordinator on 02-7814-3083 to organise access to your letter and activation code.

Stage 2, activate your school. Your principal will be provided with an activation code in the welcome letter. To activate your school, you'll be required to visit the data collection website and enter your 8-digit activation code provided. Activation should take no longer than 5 minutes. Ensure that you activate your school by the 1st of May 2024 so that your school coordinator and Kindergarten teachers have enough time to complete the census.

Stage 3, nominate a staff member as your AEDC school coordinator. As part of your school activation, you'll need to enter information about your school and nominate an AEDC school coordinator. The AEDC school coordinator will assist with gathering the relevant information for teachers to complete the census from the data collection system. The school coordinator will have access to the system to oversee and facilitate the smooth running of the data collection in your school. The school principal can choose to coordinate the AEDC collection, or nominate a staff member to support this process.

Stage 4, complete the census. In New South Wales, the period for data collection is between the 1st of May 2024 to the 5th of July 2024. Teachers need to undertake the data collection within this time and, if possible, in one block. The AEDC school coordinator can follow the onscreen prompts to monitor teachers' progress with data collection activities. There are professional learning courses in the system and on the AEDC New South Wales webpage to support you in the data collection.

Stage 5, finalise your school. After the AEDC school coordinator confirms that participating teachers have completed the collection, the AEDC school coordinator will then finalise the school's involvement in the AEDC collection. Finalising your involvement includes making sure that all students have had their instrument completed, or it has been recorded in the system why they aren't participating. Your invoice and school profile will be automatically generated as the final step. Most of the invoicing information will be pre-populated based on the number of children and teachers involved. Invoices are to be completed by the 30th of August 2024. To help us improve the data collection process and system, you'll be prompted to provide feedback by completing the post-participation feedback survey.

Stage 6, engage with your AEDC school profile. The school coordinator should download the school profile and share results with your director educational leadership, school leaders, and teachers, especially those that completed the collection. We strongly encourage your school to review the data and facilitate engagement and reflection on the AEDC outcomes for children enrolled in your school. The data collected does not provide information about a school's performance, but provides a snapshot of how children in your school and community are developing. The information can be used to support school planning and situational analysis towards meeting the learning and wellbeing needs of children. The New South Wales government and the Australian government use the AEDC data to inform allocation of resources, practice, and policy decisions. More information and resources about the AEDC and how the data is used can be accessed on the New South Wales AEDC Department of Education website and the AEDC National website. If you have questions or would like more information, please contact New South Wales AEDC State Coordinator on aedc@det.nsw.edu.au.

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