AEDC NSW research symposium 2025
AEDC NSW hosted a symposium for key stakeholders on Wednesday 18 June 2025 incorporating the AEDC 2024 data published at the community, state and national levels.
The research symposium aimed to:
- raise awareness of the value of the AEDC data
- increase awareness of the 2024 data outcomes for NSW and Australia
- create an opportunity for various stakeholders to come together and reflect on the evidence
- encourage stakeholders to engage with the data alongside other key data
- showcase how different stakeholders have engaged with the data to inform their research, policy and practice
- highlight the proposed initiatives that will respond to the AEDC 2024 NSW data outcomes.
Agenda and flyer
Date: Wednesday 18 June 2025.
Theme: Shaping futures – the impact of the AEDC on early years education.
Keynote addresses
The 2025 symposium brought together experts from the early learning sector Australia-wide.
Session 1 – Mark Barraket
Session title – NSW responds to the AEDC 2024 data outcomes.
In this session, Deputy Secretary for Early Childhood Outcomes (ECO), Mark Barraket highlights what the AEDC data means for the NSW Department of Education and how the evidence will help the department support outcomes for children and families across NSW through the implementation of Our Plan for NSW Public Education.
Watch 'NSW responds to the AEDC 2024 data outcomes' (26:28).
[Video shows speaker in front of project screen and reads 'Mark Barraket, Deputy Secretary, Early Childhood Outcomes, NSW DoE']
Mark Barraket
Good morning everyone. I hope you can hear me in the room and online.
Can I thank Lauren for that wonderful Acknowledgement of Country, which was spoken in language. So, thank you very much, Lauren.
I too would like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the Lands that we're joining on. We're on the Land of the Baramadagal people of the Dharug Nation here, just shy of the shoreline for the Parramatta River. A river that has been part of this continent for 29 million years and the Darug people have cared for it for the last 60 million years.
I want to pay my respects to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to any Aboriginal people that are joining us for this meeting.
Can I welcome each of you to this symposium to talk about the latest release of the AEDC data. Thank you for attending those in the room and thanks to those that are joining online. I think we've got around 500 people, so quite a significant turnup.
I do want to thank our Primary School colleagues, regardless of sector, Public Schools, Catholic Schools, Independent Schools, for participating in this important data collection process.
I'm actually old enough to remember when it first came into being, so when I was a young teacher and they kicked off this program, I really wasn't quite sure what the purpose was. But we're in the sixth iteration of it now, and I think we've got good data and information that does paint a picture of what is happening for young children nationally and here in New South Wales as well.
That can help inform the program design and delivery for a range of things in early childhood education and as children transition into school and then think about the supports we wrap around our communities as well to enable children to be developmentally on track.
Can I thank the expert presenters who are going to be sharing their knowledge with us today.
They'll provide more context around the evidence base and hopefully that will give you a framework and some prompts to reflect upon so that you can further engage with this data. Not just at your school level, but I'd encourage you to look at your community and at the State level information as well.
Can I acknowledge and thank the AEDC State Coordinators and some AEDC National Committee members from other jurisdictions from across Australia who are present here today as well. There are also representatives from the AEDC National Project Team from within the Australian Government's Department of Education, staff from the Centre for Community Childcare Health and the Social Research Centre, as the Data Management Agency that manages the AEDC data collection analysis. They're all here in the room today.
So, thank you for your hard work and your commitment to this collection period, and that has led to us coming here to together today.
As a principal, I was a proud principal of two primary schools. Chullora Public School in Sydney's Southwest, and then Croydon Public School in Sydney's Inner West.
Even though they're only 14 kilometres apart, they were very, very different school communities. The first one that I had the privilege of leading, Chullora, was a low socioeconomic status community. 97% of the population was Lebanese Muslim. It was a highly transient population. I recall one year where 60% of children on the school site were new that year. So that just showed the mobility of that community.
A lot of the children there did not attend any form of early learning, and they had significant developmental delays and needs, which were not identified before them coming to school.
The second school, high SES community, Croydon Public School, children did access early learning. Where there were children with needs, whether developmental delay or any other learning need, it was generally identified before they arrived at school. But regardless of that, for both schools that I led, I used the AEDC data closely with my staff and my communities that I worked with. And that helped inform the types of programs that we implemented within each school, but also how we worked with parents and other stakeholders to support children.
And at Chullora, that looks like establishing playgroups for children that were not of school age, so that we could get them into the school. We could eyeball them and have conversations with the parents about what we were observing. It also meant that we could run parent workshops around how to support their children with their developmental needs.
And at Croydon, which was very different because parents were already accessing early learning, it was more about the types of resources that was available to support them with their child's learning journey.
The New South Wales government is committed to the AEDC census. This is why for each collection, the Department partners with New South Wales Public and Non-Government schools across New South Wales to ensure we have a significant participation rate for the data collection.
In 2024, over 2,300 primary schools across all sectors in New South Wales participated in this collection process. Quite a significant number of schools. It involved over 5,400 teachers. That's a big investment for our kindergarten teachers and our staff who support this process because we screened around 90,700 Kindergarten kids that were enrolled in our schools.
And as you know, New South Wales is the largest state in Australia, so 30% of the data sample are children from within New South Wales. So, this is quite a significant effort, and I once again want to commend our teachers who enabled this to happen. And I also want to thank those families that enabled their children to participate, for granting consent, to allow schools to complete the data collection and the school leaders and Kindergarten teachers who invested their time and energy to collect this valuable information.
And through this commitment that we now have important and significant data to better understand children's diverse developmental strengths and the challenges as they start full-time schooling.
Today we are here to begin to reflect on this information and to plan on how we can respond to this data.
The AEDC data provides vital information for schools as well as governments and the broader community to pinpoint the services, resources and supports that are needed to bring lifelong benefits to children and the wider community.
Today's sessions we'll showcase the value of your time and effort in ensuring that the AEDC data set was comprehensive and is able to support the community as we work towards supporting all children on their learning journey.
The focus of today's symposium is to help us commence a process of shaping futures by exploring the impact of this data on early years education. The 2024 AEDC data is the sixth data collection, so we now have a robust and strong picture of how we are tracking with our youngest learners.
And regardless of the context in which you work, whether you're a Primary School Teacher in a Non-Government setting, a Public School, a Catholic School, or an early years educator or teacher, I encourage you to consider how you might work towards reviewing and improving the policy and practice within your context to ensure better outcomes for young children in New South Wales.
I do hope that you've had an opportunity to review the data. At a state, community and school level, we'll refer to this data throughout the day and I encourage you to download a copy of the data so that will enable your reflection throughout today's sessions.
After lunch, in our table activities, you'll be supported and guided to reflect on the data and ask to consider some key questions.
The data is available on the AEDC National Data Hub, and you can access it by searching AEDC Data or scanning the link on your table, and that will help you access it.
Today's symposium is an excellent showcase of how various stakeholders can engage with the AEDC data to inform and influence policy and practice within your context.
The range of speakers today will provide us with guidance, tools and evidence that can inform our further engagement with this critical data set. I encourage you not only to look at the data presented to you today, but look at your community data as well, because the community data is representative what's happening more widely in the context of which our individual children live, and it can help us inform the outcomes that we are driving towards.
Considerations relating to this data set include the societal context in which our children have started their developmental journey, including things like the cost of living crisis and pressures that are on families right across the country.
The data and the outcomes we see further highlight the significance of the first 2000 days of a child's life and suggest the results of being discussed might be influenced by factors from critical periods that were interrupted by COVID-19.
There is complexity when attributing the increased vulnerability that we're seeing through this dataset solely to COVID-19. And I would also like to acknowledge that there are multiple underlying trends that have likely influenced the observed changes we can see now through this data.
The Department of Education is keen to further explore the shifts in vulnerability across various domains and priority groups such as children in low socioeconomic areas, children with language backgrounds other than English and children living in remote areas and communities.
The data shows that in some instances there might be increased vulnerability among more advantaged groups, this cycle compared to previous cycles, such as those children in high socioeconomic communities and families, and also in major cities.
The 2024 data reveals that although New South Wales had a decrease in the percentage of children developmentally on track in all five domains, New South Wales is now ahead of other states and nationally the percentage of children on track in all five AEDC domains is stronger compared to other states and territories.
Looking nationally, New South Wales saw the smallest increase in the percentage of children developmentally vulnerable on one or more or two or more domains. The 2024 trend shows a significant shift in all three AEDC summary indicators.
There was an increase in developmental vulnerability in one or more domains and a decrease in the percentage of children who are developmentally on track in all five AEDC domains. And for Aboriginal children, there is still a significant gap between their results and that of the wider community.
The societal competence domain experienced a shift with a decrease in the percentage of children on track by 0.8% since 2021.
The emotional maturity domain was the most affected within this cycle with a 1.1 percentage point decrease in the percentage of children on track since 2021. We can also see a similar downward trend in the language and cognitive skills domain.
There have been significant increases in vulnerability on the social competence domain, emotional maturity domain, and the language and cognitive skills domain of this data.
We have seen a small decline in outcomes for all children in the percentage of children on track across all five AEDC domains in New South Wales, and this is applicable to all groups of children. COVID-19 cannot be the only explanation as to why we are seeing these changes.
We need to dig deep into this data, dive into it, and to understand what are the other contributing factors that have influenced these outcomes in New South Wales and nationally.
The AEDC data does continue to inform the department's work across New South Wales to deliver the New South Wales government's vision for early childhood education and care. For New South Wales public schools a key focus area in the New South Wales plan for public education is to give every child the best start in learning, and we do have a range of programs to support this.
We're on track to deliver 100 new public preschools by Term 1 2027 with the first one of those opened in late 2024. Fantastic preschool facility at Gulyangarri Public School, and this will double the number of public preschools across New South Wales. It's important work that we need to do because 90% of a child's brain development happens in the first five years of their life before they start school. That's when children start to make sense of the world in which they live in.
So delivery of these new public preschools will make sure that more families have access to preschool in their local area.
The Departments also focused on making preschool and early learning more affordable and accessible for children and families. Our Start Strong program delivers fee relief to 200,000 families.
The AEDC data shows the importance of prioritising supports for Aboriginal children, children living in regional, rural, and remote communities and children living with additional needs, and those that are from families with Language Backgrounds Other Than English [LBOTE].
The department's first steps Aboriginal early childhood education strategy focuses on the provision of culturally responsive and supportive ECEC for Aboriginal children across New South Wales.
The first iteration of this strategy is coming to an end at the end of this year. And I do want to acknowledge the New South Wales Aboriginal Education Consultative Group, and Gudjagang Gulgul, which is our Aboriginal Early Childhood Education and Care Committee who have been collaborating with us on the next iteration of our First Steps strategy. And I was hoping, I was hoping that I'd be able to share with you today, the investment that the government is making in the next strategy, but the release of that is going to be delayed until after State Budget, which is next week.
So please keep an eye out on that because there is some exciting initiatives that we are going to be putting in place with our refreshed first step strategy that will support Aboriginal community controlled organisations and Aboriginal communities more broadly to support quality provision of ECEC for Aboriginal children.
I also want to speak to Brighter Beginnings, which is a nation leading program that is a cross agency partnership with agencies such as the Department of Communities of Justice, New South Wales Health and others, and the Department of Education is the lead for this.
There's a range of programs through Brighter Beginnings, which include the Aboriginal Children and Family Centres, the Digital Baby Book, Sustaining New South Wales Family and the Pregnancy Family Conferencing, as well as our online Brighter Beginnings Parent and Carer Information Hub.
If you haven't taken a look at that online hub, it is rich with information to support families with how to look at their child's development and support that development, but also for school communities to use as well with their parents.
As part of Brighter Beginnings, we also initiated health and development checks for four-year-olds across New South Wales. To date, we've had over 16,000 health and development checks delivered, and unsurprisingly we are identifying children that have needs and that are developmentally off track through that process ahead of them commencing school.
As part of that program, we also delivered over 860 grants to a number of early learning services right across New South Wales to support them with the opt-in to the program and provide capacity and capability uplift and resources to ECEC services to support children's health and development.
The AEDC data shows us that not enough children are getting the support they need to be ready to thrive as they commence their learning journey.
The referrals data we are seeing out of this program as it continues to grow and rolls out, aligns with what we are seeing with the AEDC data results.
The Brighter Beginnings team will also shortly be launching a Connect and Communicate toolkit, which has been informed by this data, and it looks at language and cognitive skills and communication, and general knowledge as well.
The toolkit has been a true collaboration between the New South Wales Department of Education and the Department of Health. It has been developed with some of the leading speech pathologists in New South Wales and designed for use by ECEC professionals in ECEC services.
The toolkit is a professional learning resource for ECEC professionals to support communication development of 4-year-old children, and I suspect that many Primary Schools will also be interested in that resource.
We are working with colleagues from across government to develop new foundational supports for people with disability, focusing on children under the age of 9 with autism and developmental delay. And we'll have more to say in the future about the program that we intend to put in place for foundational supports in New South Wales.
The AEDC data highlights that children in some areas are missing out on critical supports that they need. The Department is working to support the provision of early learning services in underserved communities. Around 40% of New South Wales is underserved. Around 28% we would say is a childcare desert. That is there's literally no early learning provision.
We know that if we can deliver high quality early learning education and care in these areas that are underserved and underrepresented, then children will be given a better opportunity as they start their lifelong learning journey, and it'll have a positive impact on the communities where there currently is not provision.
The National Disability Data Asset Project is another example of how we have used the AEDC data in New South Wales. The asset claims to be a one stop shop, data shop that informs the evidence base to help governments, service providers and researchers to improve the effectiveness of services and supports for people with disability. The AEDC data set was one of the data sets that we used to inform the National Disability Data Asset.
We have here with us today some key programs and project teams as part of this event. Some are in the room and some are online, and we've got representatives from the team that I lead within the Department of Education Early Childhood Outcomes. They're going to be using the learnings from today to inform our ongoing work to improve children's developmental outcomes right across New South Wales.
We've got a fantastic lineup of speakers for you. Our speakers have been invited because of their expertise in this space. I do think you'll find their insights quite engaging and thought provoking.
This morning we're going to hear from Elizabeth Hickey from the Early Childhood Data and Preschool Branch at the Australian Department of Education. She will highlight AEDC outcomes for Australia to give us a broad perspective from the national context.
Liz will be followed by Professor Tony Dreise, who is the Pro Vice Chancellor First Nations Engagement at Charles Sturt University. Tony will reflect on some of the challenges communities face as they engage with AEDC data and sometimes question the validity of this data and if it captures the contextual needs of Aboriginal children.
After morning tea, we're going to hear from Associate Professor Yasmin Harman-Smith and Dr Tess Gregory from the Kids Research Institute Australia, who will take us through a deep dive into the New South Wales data.
We'll also hear from Christine Jackson from the Australian Education Research Organisation, AERO. Who do great research work. I think we're all familiar with that.
And our morning sessions will wrap up with Professor Kristin Laurens from the University of New South Wales Child Development Study Group.
After lunch, we're going to see a video from Professor Sharon Goldfield from the Centre for Community Child and Health.
I'm now going to hand back to Toni Kember, who's going to take us through the next session.
So, thank you for your participation today, and I look forward to joining you for Q&A shortly.
[End of transcript]
Session 2 – Elizabeth Hickey
Session title – AEDC 2024 National outcomes and its implications.
In this session, Assistant Secretary of the Early Childhood Data and Preschool Branch, Elizabeth Hickey highlights some of the key outcomes of the AEDC 2024 national outcomes and their immediate implications.
Watch 'AEDC 2024 National outcomes and its implications' (18:28) and access Elizabeth Hickey AEDC Research Symposium 2025 presentation (PPTX 8.3 MB).
[Video shows speaker in front of project screen and reads 'Elizabeth Hickey, Assistant Secratary, Early Childhood Data and Preschool Branch Commonwealth Department']
Elizabeth Hickey
Good morning, everybody.
I'd like to thank Lauren and also acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the Lands we're meeting on today and pay my respects to Elders past and present and also extend that respect to any First Nations people who are joining us here today.
It's a privilege for my team and I to be welcomed to talk to you today about the 2024 national results from the AEDC and their implications.
The AEDC is one of the most comprehensive and important data sets we have to understand how children are developing in their early years, a period that lays the foundation for lifelong wellbeing.
It is also a collection well embedded in practice. Collected every three years since 2009, the census provides population level insights across five key developmental domains.
These insights help shape our Government's Communities and Services response to the needs of children across Australia, so well covered by Mark in his opening address.
But the AEDC provides more than just data. It gives us a national snapshot of children's wellbeing, strengths and challenges as they begin school. It highlights where children are thriving, and critically where action is needed.
The data directly supports national priorities, such as the Early Years Strategy, which focuses on improving outcomes for children in their first five years. It also tracks developmental vulnerability to support progress against closing the gap target for ensuring First Nations children are developmentally on track.
Now turning to the 2024 national picture, these latest results reveal some concerning shifts that call for focus, consideration, and collective action. The 2024 AEDC results give us a clear national picture of how children born in 2019 and 2020 during a period of major social disruption are developing as they enter school.
The early years for many of these children were shaped by interrupted access to early learning, disrupted routines, and broader community stressors. More children are now developmentally vulnerable with some of the most concerning declines being seen in social competence and emotional maturity. Both of which are essential for a children's ability to regulate emotions, connect with peers, and settle into learning.
In 2024, the social competence domain saw an increase in developmental vulnerability by 1.1 percentage points to 10.7%. The largest shift since the AEDC collection began. Similarly in the emotional maturity domain, developmental vulnerability increased by 1.5 percentage points to 10%, the largest increase in developmental vulnerability across all domains in this collection.
Both these two domains have now fallen below the baseline set in 2009. This slide breaks down vulnerability across all five domains. As you can see, vulnerability has increased in every domain since 2021. Not just social and emotional, but also physical health, language and cognitive skills and communication.
This tells us we are not seeing isolated pockets of concern, but a broad shift in child development that warrants national attention.
This slide gives us a clear view of the broader shifts in child development. 23.5% of children are now developmentally vulnerable on one or more domains, approaching the baseline level of 23.6%, recorded in 2009 and the highest since then.
Even more concerning is DV2 children vulnerable on two or more domains has reached a new high at 12.5%.
This means more children are not just struggling, they're facing layered compounding challenges right at the start of school. And we are not just seeing more vulnerability, we're also seeing fewer children thriving. The percentage of children on track across all five domains or OT5 has dropped to just 52.9% down from nearly 54.8.
These indicators show that while many children are doing well, the proportion experiencing vulnerability is growing and the proportion thriving across all domains is shrinking.
The AEDC provides insights into who is most affected by developmental vulnerability and where we are seeing progress, particularly amongst First Nations children.
First Nations children continue to be overrepresented among those who are developmentally vulnerable. These findings relate directly to Closing the Gap target five, which aims to see 55% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children developmentally on track in all five domains by 2031.
The AEDC provides critical insight into progress toward that target and allows us to assess where national and local efforts may be making a difference.
We've seen some notable positive trends in the 2024 data. Vulnerability among First Nations children has declined by 0.6 percentage points in the language and cognitive skills domain, reversing an upward trend that had been evident from 2015 to 2021. This improvement in language and cognitive skills for First Nations children contrast the national trend of increases in developmental vulnerability on all five domains.
We've also seen a consistent decrease in vulnerability in the communication and general knowledge domain across each collection cycle since 2009, from 21.3% in 2009 to 17.3% in 2024, suggesting that targeted programs and closing the gap initiatives may be starting to have an impact.
The change may reflect the cumulative impact of targeted initiatives alongside the sustained efforts of communities to support children's development in culturally grounded and locally driven ways.
At the same time, consistent with the national picture, emotional maturity showed the largest increase in vulnerability amongst First Nations children.
While the data points to real challenges, the insights give us momentum to keep listening, learning and supporting community-led efforts wherever possible.
As we unpack the 2024 results, it's important not just to focus on what's concerning, but also to recognise what's working. Among the results we consistently see a powerful pattern, certain everyday experiences in a child's early years, which are strongly linked with better outcomes.
These are the protective factors that can make a real difference, and they're also the levers we can strengthen through policy, practice, and partnership. Let's look at three of the strongest ones. Preschool attendance, reading at home, and parental engagement.
Firstly, Preschool. The AEDC shows a strong and consistent link between Preschool participation and improved developmental outcomes.
In fact, the 2024 data shows that children who attended Preschool were almost 1.5 times as likely to be developmentally on track across all five AEDC domains. And this isn't just about academic readiness. It includes emotional maturity, social competence, and communication skills.
When we look specifically at the language and cognitive skills domain, which includes early literacy and numeracy, Preschool attendance continues to show a strong protective effect. Children who attended ECEC were significantly more likely to be on track in these foundational areas.
The second protective factor is something that many families already do, reading at home. Reading to children builds early language communication and cognitive skills, some of the strongest predictors of school success.
The 2024 AEDC data confirms what we've seen in previous collections, that children who were read to at home were significantly more likely to be developmentally on track across five domains. As the above picture shows in 2024, 58.1% of children were on track across all five domains if read to at home compared to only 9.9% of children who were not read to at home.
The data also shows those who weren't read to at home were more likely to be developmentally vulnerable on one or more and two or more domains.
Sorry about that.
This simple but powerful activity, I should have realised because there's a pile of books, continues to make a meaningful difference. And the AEDC helps us to see where efforts to promote reading could be strengthened locally.
And finally, parental engagement, a factor that often gets less attention but has a profound impact. In the 2024 AEDC, children whose parents were actively engaged in school life were over five times as likely to be developmentally on track across all domains at 63.4%.
We've long understood the value of parental involvement, but the AEDC now gives us the data to act. It helps us to identify communities where school engagement is lower and tailor responses accordingly.
These findings highlight the importance of national efforts, like the early years strategy and the Preschool outcomes measure that is currently being trialled, working together to define shared outcomes, guide investment, and build a stronger understanding of how to best support children's development.
By focusing on the protective factors that matter, like engagement, attendance, and reading, we can help ensure services are meeting children's needs where and when it counts most.
When we break down the data across all five AEDC domains, a clear trend emerges. Children identified as needing further assessment represented here by the darker bars are significantly less likely to be developmentally on track than their peers who are not flagged.
A child marked as needing further assessment is one where the teacher has observed potential development concerns that may warrant follow up.
This can include areas like medical or physical health, behaviour management, or cognitive and emotional development. It's not a diagnosis, but it is an important early indicator that further evaluation or support might be required.
Importantly, this group is separate from children with identified special needs. Special needs children are not included in this AEDC domain results table due to the substantial developmental needs already recognised. However, teachers still provide background information on those children to help inform broader community planning.
What stands out in this data is the scale of change. In 2024, nearly 30,000 more children were flagged as needing further assessment compared to 2009. And the greatest difference in developmental outcomes between needing further assessment and non NFA children appears in the domain of social competence. This suggests that social development may be particularly sensitive to limited early social experiences such as those faced by children born during the pandemic.
These children may have had fewer opportunities to develop key skills assessed in this domain, including co-operation, respect, curiosity, and readiness to explore new situations. Skills that are essential for forming relationships and engaging effectively in the classroom.
The 2024 AEDC results highlight not only developmental trends, but also broader pressures across the system and sector. While the rise in children needing further assessment raises questions about how well we are reaching children early, it also draws attention to the capacity and coordination challenges many services are facing.
Coordinating timely pathways for support can be complex, particularly when demand is already high. This underscores the importance of improving how systems work together so children don't fall through the gaps.
As data is used more consistently, and AEDC data is used across a wider range of practice areas, if well embedded into planning and practice, there is opportunity to more strongly align the data with existing health, disability, and child protection systems to inform early responses.
Workforce shortages we know also remain a persistent challenge across the early childhood sector. These shortages affect the availability and consistency of services, particularly in areas experiencing high levels of vulnerability.
Finally, the data draws attention to longstanding inequities. First Nations children and children living in remote communities continue to experience higher rates of developmental vulnerability, reinforcing the need for sustained, culturally informed and place-based responses.
Along with the significant work being undertaken by our State and Territory colleagues on the ground, the department, my department is actively working closely with these jurisdictions to act on what the AEDC is revealing. Firstly, through National Preschool Reform, we're delivering the Preschool reform agreement and developing the Preschool Outcomes Measure.
This work strengthens the national evidence base on access participation and outcomes, especially for children in vulnerable cohorts. This work is directly supported by the 2024 AEDC data, which will inform the development of the next early year Strategy Implementation Plan, and guide discussions on future Preschool funding and child development initiatives.
We're also focused on building a stronger, more stable workforce. The Government's workforce reforms, including the workforce strategy and the worker retention payment, a government grant designed to increase wages for ECEC workers and boost supply.
Second, we're investing in early learning infrastructure.
The Building Better Early Learning Fund is directing capital investment into areas with high developmental vulnerability, places where families often face multiple and layered challenges. And from January 26, every child will have access to three days a week of subsidised early childhood education and care giving all children the opportunity for quality early learning.
As highlighted earlier, access to Preschool is a powerful protective factor with AEDC data showing that children who attended Preschool were 1.5 times more likely to be developmentally on track across all five domains, reinforcing the importance of universal access and high-quality early learning environments.
We're also strengthening support for inclusion and for First Nations children through programs like the Inclusion Support Program and Connected Beginnings. We're building local capability, embedding cultural safety and delivering place-based models that is designed with communities, not just for them.
This aligns with the early years strategy, which provides a unifying national framework for this work, and it's supported by leadership across research, government and community.
We're also focused on the children who are already in school. The 2024 AEDC cohort are now in Year 1. For many, the vulnerabilities we are seeing will show up again in NAPLAN or other school-based assessments unless we act early.
While responses are led by states and territories, the Commonwealth supports national coordination through programs, funding and shared data tools. This includes the student wellbeing boost, school-based mental health supports, and the use of AEDC school profiles to help guide local planning.
And finally, we are working to connect AEDC data across systems by linking it with other data, such as the NDIS, health and Preschool participation for example, we can create a clearer picture of children's needs and improve how services respond.
The AEDC gives us a shared evidence base highlighting where children are thriving, where vulnerabilities are increasing, and where we need to focus our efforts. But data alone doesn't shift outcomes, it's how we use it.
Across states and territories and communities around the country there's already meaningful work underway to support children and families. The opportunity now is to build on this momentum, aligning what we've learned, coordinating our efforts, and scaling what is working.
The Australian Government's early year strategy provides the national framework to support this. It sets out a vision for children's wellbeing backed by clear priorities and a strong focus on collaboration across governments and sectors. Through it, we can align investments, strengthen accountability, and focus our collective efforts where they have the greatest impact.
As mentioned, the AEDC is more than a data collection. It offers a national lens on how well we are supporting children in their early years and where targeted effort is needed. The 2024 results highlight a clear challenge. More children are now entering school developmentally vulnerable with complex needs that require earlier and more coordinated responses.
We also have a clearer sense of what works. We aren't starting from scratch. We have national data shared priorities through the early years strategy and strong policy foundations to build on.
The task ahead is to translate these insights into action by improving how we target support, align programs, and track progress over time, ensuring that every child, regardless of postcode or circumstances, has the strongest possible start.
Thank you very much.
[End of transcript]
Session 3 – Professor Tony Dreise
Session title – Improving engagement with the AEDC data – learnings from a First Nations research project
The AEDC data is a valuable data set, notwithstanding aspects of the data collection and release, that need further improvement. The AEDC still has unmet potential as it gives a good indication of early childhood development across Australia. If development in the early years is actualised as expected, then all other lifelong goals have the potential to be fully attained.
This session highlights the need to develop a long-sighted view and cross government collaboration to ensure improvement in early childhood outcomes in the coming years. This session also shares some of the findings from an AEDC First Nations project where there was a varied level of awareness and understanding of the AEDC across different stakeholders’ group.
This session is led by Professor Tony Dreise who is:
- Pro Vice-Chancellor First Nations Engagement – Charles Sturt University
- Professor Indigenous Policy – Australian National University
- Director – Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University
Watch 'Research Project into AEDC and First Nations in Queensland ' (29:38) and access Professor Tony Dreise AEDC Research Symposium 2025 presentation (PPTX 4.7 MB).
[Video shows speaker in front of project screen and reads 'Professor Tony Dreise, Pro Vice-Chancellor First Nations Engagement - CSU']
Professor Tony Dreise
Yama. Good morning, everyone.
I begin as is our custom by Acknowledging Country and the fact that we're on the Lands of the Durag people. And I thank Lauren for her Welcome to Country in Language. I found profound kind of poetic value in it. And let me tell you why.
One of the first schools in Australia was here. And when I say Australia, I mean Post-Colonial Australia or Colonial Australia. In 1814, the Native Institution, as it was called, was established here on the rivers of Parramatta.
I loved Lauren's Welcome because she spoke in Language. One of the first objectives, if you will, of the Native Institution was to stop Aboriginal children speaking in Language, in 1814. The great endeavour, if I can put it that way, at that time was to civilize, domesticate and Christianise Aboriginal children.
And so, to hear Lauren, well on three front fronts, representing a Public School, representing her people, and enrolling in her degree. I was very excited to receive that Welcome to Country.
Today, I want to talk about, and I'm going to ask Mary to drive this because I think through Mark and Liz, the tech front's not going too good. So, I'll get Mary to help drive this for me.
The purpose of my presentation is to share a research project that I undertook in Queensland a couple years back. And can I acknowledge, Madeline Hagan, who's the Mary for Queensland and who's here in blues country. As we prepare, Maddie and I prepare for a Queensland victory tonight. Really important stuff, both AEDC and State of Origin.
I want to share a project I undertook a couple of years ago and that project I ended up calling Becoming More.
And I was driven by, and I'm a great believer in tree analogies. And this is something I've been thinking about over a number of years, how we might Indigenise, for want of a better term, I don't like that word but let me use it, the Australian Early Years Learning Framework. And for me it begins with belonging and their roots tied to Country, tied to an identity.
Being is the core, I think, of early living and free life. Namely that you're healthy, that it's strong. You know, there's a beautiful part of that movie, 'The Revenant', albeit shot within the context of First Nations in America. But there's a scene where the wife talks to the husband, she's passed on, but she's saying, hold that tree. Because that's your strength, that's your core.
And of course, when we're talking about early childhood development or education more broadly, we're talking about people becoming. Reaching up, reaching out, branching out. And so with that background, that context, I want to frame this presentation.
Now for those who like to cut to the chase. Well, what was the number one finding of my report?
Well, the AEDC is important. It's incredibly important, but it must become more.
And one way to do that very quickly is for there to be both a perception and a reality that early childhood development does not just belong to education portfolios.
That is so incredibly important, and we are not there. You've got this kind of dilemma within the early childhood sector, you're both guardians and producers of these data, but you are held to them exclusively, and that's not helpful.
So much of early childhood development requires, for example, health responses, community planning responses, visioning for regional development. Because what we know very, very strongly is the close relationship between vulnerable children and other wider factors.
Be it poverty, be it violence, be it isolation, geographical isolation. And so, from the very outset, the challenge I like to pose, and think about and work with people about is if it takes a community to raise a child, and we thank African people for that beautiful proverb, if it takes a village to raise a child, then who's looking after the villages?
And in this country, there is no doubt our villages are inequitable.
Ok, so, let's think about this report. And today I want to unpack it very quickly. I'm working from the kind of inspiration across the road. You've got Yilabara, people who work in this building would be aware of Yilabara Pathway.
What does it mean?
Well, it means shortcut. It means a quick way through. So, I'm going to give the shortcut version of my research project.
I just want to acknowledge the wonderful Jody Burns, who's from the Butchulla people in Queensland. That's an illustration there of body parts in language. And I think it's a key learning for us. Every opportunity we get to get two-way learning happening. Let's take it.
Okay, I won't bore you with this. This is the research methods and approach that I took. You can see it there. It principally involved field work. It was more qualitative in its design and application than quantitative. That said, we go forward Mary, please. It was driven by a number of motivations.
The Nation has set itself the ambitious task of getting 55% of our children on track by 2035.
In 2025, are we likely to land there?
No. No, not based on, we've now got, is it six? We're into our sixth set of data and the progress has been marginal at best.
So that was a key kind of consideration in underpinning the research. Another was to drive understanding of partnerships, programs and service provision, build data confidence within First Nations communities, and enable data ownership amongst First Nations. And we're still a long way off that, whether it be at parental level or at community level.
That is not to say there aren't pockets of gems out there. There are, there's some really good stuff happening at local levels.
The places, I'm not going to name the schools. If we go to the next one, Mary, this is me and my trees again. These trees are kind of represent the different countries, nations that I travelled across. I don't name the schools, but I do name the Aboriginal nations.
We go to the next one.
As I said, the research was qualitative in application ie interviews and focus groups. Mainly structured, but some semi.
As a researcher, you know, you might think you're going into a structured interview. It doesn't always happen that way. Conversations can take off in all sorts of directions, and that's not a bad thing.
The research obviously wasn't longitudinal. It was a snapshot in time in 2023. And engagement was principally with, I've called them end users at local levels, as opposed to producers of data.
We go to the next one, Mary.
So, they're the sites that I undertook the research. We had 40% of participants were First Nations. Interviews were with principals, deputies, heads of studies, et cetera.
Three deadly Kindies involved in Queensland. Bearing in mind Queensland, Kindies have a different meaning to New South Wales, and you know, it's kind of like the train tracks of Australia, you know, different systems, and Indigenous health providers and others. They're in depth as opposed to wide.
If we go to the next one, a lot of things came up in interviews which were outside of the scope. I was there to talk about AEDC data, how well it's known, the extent to which it's used. But of course, a number of things come up and I didn't want to, and I fed this information to the Department, a lot of things came up which were recurring and of concern and some of the speakers have already touched on this.
I know Liz, for example, you talked about Workforce Development that is so big in regional and remote places. It's such a big concern, not just Workforce Development from the point of view of education, but for health. You know, where places I went to, parents and communities were waiting two to three years for Allied Health Services.
So, if your child had a diagnosis, for example, that were, say, cognitive based or psychologically based, you might be looking at two or three years before you get to see specialists, and that's a real concern in some parts of Australia.
In terms of Kindy teachers. So, we're talking, you know, here, we're in New South Wales, we're talking Preschool teachers. Hard to recruit people and to keep them. One of the reasons is inequities around pay. And I heard that quite a bit.
An interesting thing I heard a number of times was in adopting strength-based approaches, it's almost a disincentive for people to talk about needs.
Does that make sense?
So, we want strength-based thinking. Of course we do, but that can't come at the expense of realities in terms of needs including, for example, children who come into school hungry.
Parental engagement I've already touched upon, is a big challenge. But not always for negative reasons. This is school saying we are finding it hard to engage with our parents and our communities. In some places, in some places that I visited, the school had such a good reputation and good feel within community that parents were just totally comfortable for them to go to school and be taken care of. So, it wasn't all kind of, negative based.
I went out there to ask questions about AEDC, which went to awareness, needs in terms of information, how it's presented, who it's presented to, who it's presented by, how it's presented, and its strategic use, particularly in a future sense.
And there I go to thinking beyond sector. There I go to thinking about place. These data should be equally owned by other parts of society and government as it is in education. That simple.
So, what were the findings?
If we move on, Mary. Thank you.
Look, it was patchy out there. Some principals knew a little or nothing about AEDC. Others were right across it, and it helped school planning. It helped, kind of, recruitment in terms of the skills and expertise the school needed. And most encouragingly in a number of schools I visited, it helped drive partnerships.
Whether it was with universities, for example, one example, there's QUT optometry, another health specialists. You know, another school had a relationship with the University of Queensland, which was all around the provision of whole child health support.
The Murray Kindies that are, or Deadly Kindies that I visited, they actually kind of sprung from the field of health as opposed to the field of education. And so, the health of children is intimately tied to their whole MO, their whole reason for being.
And I've already talked about investing in local place, link in thinking, local place-based thinking, rather than just school-based thinking.
And of course, that we ensure that we don't adopt one size fits all approaches. And there's still a temptation and indeed a practice out there that we can centrally design a program and seek to impose it. We've got to think more grassroots up.
Mary.
Of course, when I was out there talking COVID, we were talking, you know, a lot of the children we were talking about, were the COVID kids.
I've yet to look at the data more closely in terms of, well, what was the impact on First Nations children?
And not all of those answers obviously are going to come from AEDC data, but I think that's still a live question as to whether there has been an impact, particularly in terms of social development.
Again, the realities that exist in communities and they're not just Indigenous issues. We're talking about some places in Queensland, and indeed it applies to this State as it does to Australia more broadly where a lot of communities are on the edge.
To quote Tony Vincent,
'There is a strong correlation between education outcomes and place disadvantage.'
Social marginalisation, you know, kind of, economic marginalisation and disadvantage by virtue of geography.
I've already reflected on qualified teachers, and the workforce demands out there.
We'll keep going.
One quote I picked up on was, and I refer to a particular Principal in this case in North Queensland. You know, they were all over the data. They pulled it apart, and I'm quoting here, and we developed an action plan.
Now, that can go to things such as breakfast clubs, sporting programs. One school, the data indicated kids were going backwards in terms of physical development. So they created sporting clubs between schools and community.
One comment that jumped out for me was the timing of AEDC is off. By that they meant well we shouldn't just be assessing at Kindy, but that we assess in Kindy and then again at the end of Prep, and their argument was our interventions are often too late.
So, I mean, that's a big question for AEDC, whether it's this kind of one-off event as opposed to something that's more inbuilt rather than bolted on.
A clear demand for a presentation of data that, you know, that is de-jargonised and easy to follow, including for parents, which isn't to say we need to dumb things down. I like to say we need to clear things up. Make it clear. Use language that's clear and understandable and digestible, or better still perhaps talk in pictures.
As Patrick Dodson says,
'Our people talk in pictures.'
So how do we illustrate what's going on in communities and in, I mean, literally illustrate what's going on in communities and with children?
Did that jump over?
Next one, please, Mary.
I've already talked about, you know, the sorts of responses that some places have had, including daily fitness programs, as opposed to what I might've said earlier about sporting clubs. No, we're talking about daily fitness programs.
One thing that we probably aren't thinking enough about is who's undertaking the assessments?
Well, we're talking early childhood teachers, aren't we?
We're talking about Prep teachers or Kindy teachers, depending what jurisdiction you're in.
In a lot of regional and remote places, they can be first year teachers. You know, in Queensland you've still got an old, kind of decades old system where you do your time in the bush before you get to the Sunshine Coast. It may well be true in terms of New South Wales, I don't know. But we're talking early educators who are early career. And in the case of First Nations children, of course, the requirement is to have an Indigenous educator, usually an AEA or education assistant, who's a part of the process as well, to make sure that it's culturally grounded.
What I heard more and more as I travel was the need for further professional development. In undertaking AEDC assessment processes and ensuring things such as cultural bias aren't there. Which is a very difficult thing to do when you think about the scale of this endeavour. I don't know how many tens of thousands of children, thousands of teachers, thousands of schools.
In some places the state I travel very proactive regional offices in building capability around AEDC processes. And there were a couple of real shining lights in terms of regional offices and their proactivity and the value that they add to it, how data are collected and interpreted.
The next one Mary please.
I assume we're going to share these slides, so I'm not going to read all of that, but it gives a glimpse, the Deadly Kindies Model. What I like about it, it's equally education and it's equally health. And in thinking about whole child development, it naturally includes consideration to cultural growth and AEDC doesn't do that.
Whether that's a weakness or a good thing, I don't know. But we can't pretend that we are assessing whole child if we're overlooking cultural dimensions. Language.
Who's your mob?
Ties to country?
These sorts of things.
We go to the next one.
So, so what are next steps?
And these are things that I spoke to the Department about.
I've already reflected on the patchiness. That shouldn't surprise you. It's a big State, with lots of schools, just like New South Wales, in fact, a bit smaller. But the result tonight will be bigger.
A strong appetite for AEDC data that is translated and customised. If you drop kind of the community profiles on the table like that with a lot of First Nations groups, it's not going to hit the mark. I come back to, you know, the virtue of talking in pictures.
And the fact that parents and caregivers, as well as other community services agencies have to be equal owners of these data. And my observation is they're not, it's seen as a school thing, and that is such a risk if we are not socializing the data into wider community forums, particularly parents. They've got to be the co-owners and co-producers of responses for their children.
I've already reflected on this in terms of, yes, strength-based principles are critically important. We've actively worked against, as a community, deficit based thinking for a good 200 odd years going back to the Native Institution. Who, incidentally, were grabbing children as young as three years. But let's not let that blinker needs-based realities. There are incredibly disproportionate levels of risk for our communities.
If we go on.
I'll actually keep going beyond that because I've touched upon a lot of this.
Let's fast forward to now.
Of course, the data, was it on Friday it was released?
Mary was going, how's this symposium going to go?
So, it came in on time, Mary.
Look, when I looked at it, a couple of things jumped out. I think we've going to be cautious about language. So, you know, the reporting here in this slide talks about non-significant. Yeah, statistically non-significant. Because we're talking what, 0.4 percentage points?
That's not the story. The story is a far bigger significant story, and if we jump over, you know, the fact is still around 66%, almost 7 out of 10 of our children are not on track across the five domains. These are First Nations children, almost 7 out of 10.
So, what do we need to do?
One of the presenters later on talks about, you know, there not being a silver bullet. And that's true. We can't think about single interventions. We've got to think holistic.
And we can do this in two ways.
One, Mary, we go to the next.
We've got to be attentive to risk factors. Not all of them are in schools.
There is undoubtedly a relationship between how our kids are progressing and tracking and developing and growing, and the state of affairs in the broader community. And they're just some of them.
Let's flip to protective factors. The next one, please Mary.
You are all aware of these. These are things that can strengthen the relationship between schools, communities, and peoples in families, including connection to Country.
Using First Nations, using is probably not the word, but leveraging First Nations extended family networks in a positive way. For example, the role of Auntie and Uncle in teaching and learning and in education. That's one example.
And of course, language and identity. And I come back to the inspiration provided by Lauren earlier.
So, in concluding, what's the way forward?
And when we go to the next one, Mary, I come back to my tree analogy, I can't help myself.
That here we go. This is the black palm in Queensland.
What's it used for?
It's used for weaving. And I think without it sounding overly simple, and it probably does, but we've got to embrace weaving more. We've got to embrace co-producing and co-designing all aspects of our early childhood development, whether it's community based planning, whether it's the relationship between teacher and parents, whether it's the relationship between school and other community service providers.
So, I kind of finish where I started, and that is the overwhelming thing that I found in my research in Queensland is the AEDC data is important. It's incredibly important, but it needs to become more.
And I'll leave it at that.
[End of transcript]
Session 4 – Professor Yasmin Harman-Smith and Dr Tess Gregory
Session title – Spotlight on the 2024 AEDC results in NSW – what we know about children starting school.
This presentation provides an overview of the 2024 AEDC results in NSW as well as state-level trends in child development over the past 15 years (2009 to 2024).
We explore trends over time in the percentage of children who are vulnerable, at risk and on track in each of the 5 developmental domains of the AEDC, as well as trends in the AEDC summary indicators. AEDC results were compared for key equity groups, such as students living in more and less socio-economically disadvantaged communities in the state, as well as children growing up in metropolitan, regional and remote areas. We explore the demographic characteristics and ECEC experiences of the children in the 2024 AEDC cohort in NSW, and contrast this with earlier cohorts of children (2009 to 2021) to help explain the trends over time in child development outcomes.
We consider what these trends tell us about how children are faring and what supports they may need as they transition to school.
Watch 'Spotlight on the 2024 AEDC results in NSW' (22:59) and access Professor Yasmin Harman-Smith and Dr Tess Gregory AEDC Research Symposium 2025 presentation (PPTX 8.6 MB).
[Video shows speakers in front of project screen and reads 'Associate Professor Yasmin Harman-Smith']
Professor Yasmin Harman-Smith
Tess and I are going to co-present, and we are actually going to have a bit of a conversation about the data, which is often how we work together.
So, I'm going to let Tess tell you all about the trends and the data and I'll be reflecting on what they might mean and the sorts of things that I would be thinking about if I was looking at this data and wondering what we should do about it.
So, over to you, Tess.
[Speakers change positon and video reads 'Dr Tess Gregory, The Kids Research Institute Australia']
Dr Tess Gregory
Ok. So, we're going to start broad and then we'll drill down.
So, I wanted to start looking at the National results, and then we'll move on to New South Wales. So other people have talked about the trends in, Liz spoke about it, and we've seen it in some of the earlier presentations. But I think seeing it visually is really helpful.
So, to start with, I've plotted the trends over time nationally in DV1 and DV2 over the 6 cycles. And so, in 2009, 23.6% of kids nationally were developmentally vulnerable in one or more domains. We saw quite a good improvement in 2012. Then we've kind of seen stability for the next few cycles, and then in 2021 we saw a small increase in DV1 and in 2024 we've seen a larger increase.
And so, we are now basically at the point where we were in 2009. So, we have a very similar level of developmental vulnerability in Australia on one or more domains in 2024 to what we had in our very first collection in 2009.
Sure.
And if we look at DV2, which is the purple lines, this is a percentage of kids developmentally vulnerable on two or more domains.
Can you go back?
So again, we saw this kind of improvement in 2012, followed by stability, and they saw a little bit of an uptick in 2021, followed by a bigger increase in vulnerability in 2024.
And if we just go onto the next slide. I just nearly called you Shannon, which is my husband's name. Apologies, Yasmin.
So, the solid lines are the New South Wales trends, and they're quite similar, but the thing that stands out to me as being a bit different is that if we look from 2018 to 2021, we started to see this increase in developmental vulnerability in New South Wales in this period of time. So, the biggest shifts in increases in vulnerability in New South Wales were really from 2018 to 2021. And then we've seen another increase in 2024, but it's a little bit smaller. So, it's a bit of a different pattern in New South Wales to what we see Nationally. And the same if you look at DV2.
And then OT5. So, this is our strengths-based summary indicator. We see that the peak or the highest level of OT5 we got to is in 2018 where 57.2% of kids in New South Wales were on track on all five domains of their development.
And then what we saw was quite a big drop in OT5 in 2021 in New South Wales, followed by a smaller drop in 2024. With that slightly different pattern, what we see nationally. So nationally, we saw a small change in 2021 and a bigger change in 2024.
So, this is really interesting, but I always want to see what the trends look like by domain because I think that tells us a little bit of a different story.
So, this graphic shows the five different developmental domains that we measure in the AEDC. So, we measure Physical Health and Wellbeing, Social Competence, which is really, kids relationships with their peers as well as their relationships with teachers, so their behaviour in the classroom. Emotional Maturity, which is really kids emotion regulations, so the capacity to regulate their own emotions. And when that's not going so well, we tend to see things like anxious and fearful behaviour, aggressive behaviour and hyperactive behaviour.
Language and Cognitive Skills is really those emergent literacy and numeracy skills, and Communication Skills and General Knowledge is more oral language skills.
So, what does this look like in New South Wales?
So, if we start with physical, that's the orange line, and I'll focus primarily on the changes from 2021 to 2024. So, there's actually been, and this plots the percentage of kids developmentally vulnerable for each of these domains. So, for physical health and wellbeing, there's been an improvement in physical health and wellbeing.
So, in 2021, 9.4% of kids were vulnerable and it's reduced to 9.2%. So, we're not really going to focus on this domain very much today.
Social Competence, we've seen an increase in developmental vulnerability from 9.4 to 9.9.
Emotional Maturity, we've seen an increase of 7.3% of kids vulnerable to 8.1.
Yasmin, I might just get you to flick to the next slide.
So, Language, we've seen an increase again, and we can see that for emotional maturity and language and cognitive skills, these are the two domains we've seen the biggest shifts in New South Wales.
And then in Communication Skills and General Knowledge there's also been an increase in developmental vulnerability, but it's a little bit smaller.
So, increases in 4 of the 5, but the biggest shifts are in emotional maturity and language and cognitive skills.
So, what we're going to do now is drill down a little bit on those two domains and try and understand what's going on in a bit more detail.
So, for most of the domains of the AEDC we can also look at the sub-domain results. So, for emotional maturity, we have scales that measure pro-social and helping behaviour, anxious and fearful behaviour, aggressive behaviour, and hyperactive and inattentive behaviour. And we can see how development on these particular aspects of emotional maturity are shifting over time.
And we can see here that if you look at the orange and the green lines, they're the ones where we've seen the biggest shifts or the biggest increases in developmental vulnerability in 2024.
So, the biggest shifts, or the biggest shift is in hyperactive and inattentive behaviour. So, in 2021, 10.5% of kids were developmentally vulnerable in this aspect of development, and it's increased to 12.3%.
So, at a population level, that is a really big shift. That's a lot of additional kids facing challenges in this area of their development. And we've also seen big shifts of 1.1 percentage points in anxious and fearful behaviour.
So, these New South Wales results highlight increases in developmental vulnerability in multiple areas of emotional maturity, in particular, anxious and fearful behaviour, and hyperactive and inattentive behaviour.
So, Yasmin, based on your understanding of the AEDC research and child development research more broadly, what flow on effects might we expect to see for these children as they progress through their primary school years?
Professor Yasmin Harman-Smith
Great question, Tess.
So, for me, one of the things I come back to, and Kristen's sitting here today, and I'm sure she'll talk about this, is the research that's been done linking challenges in these domains of development to experiences of children as they grow and move through the school system.
One of the things that came out of some research in Western Australia by Megan Bell was this graphic that I've presented many, many times because it's a pretty big deal in my view, that children with vulnerabilities and emotional maturity and social competence as they start school are far more likely to be excluded from school, and that starts early on in their schooling life, and it continues on and it gets worse.
So, we don't necessarily see that these children are being equitably included in education. They are the kids in the classroom that are too hard, too hard to manage. They get out of classroom responses. They get out of school responses.
So, that's an equity issue for me. That's a really major challenge for those children. And it doesn't just affect their future emotional wellbeing; it affects their life chances.
Kristen is here. This is some of their work, and again, you'll see that children who have particularly aggressive behaviour or hyperactive and inattentive behaviour are far more likely to be suspended or excluded from school.
Dr Tess Gregory
Thank you, Yasmin.
So now we'll go back to the New South Wales results. And remember that language and cognitive skills was the other domain in which we saw substantial increases.
So, there's also subdomains for language and cognitive skills, which are shown on the left-hand side here. So, the subdomains are Basic Literacy, Interest in literacy and numeracy, Advanced literacy and Basic numeracy.
And I'm just going to highlight the blue line, which is the Advanced literacy subdomain. And you can see that that has increased in both 2021 and 2024, and it's a really steep line.
So, in 2018, 3.8% of kids were developmentally vulnerable in their advanced literacy, and that has increased to 8.1% over two cycles. So, it's almost, it's doubled and increased just in the last cycle by 2.1 percentage points. So, this is a really big shift.
So, what does advanced literacy mean when we're talking about 5-year-olds?
These are the items from the AEDC that measure advanced literacy. So, it's things like whether kids are able to read simple words, complex words, they're interested in writing voluntarily, whether they're able to write simple words and write simple sentences.
So, we might not expect that children should be able to do these things when they start school. But nonetheless, we've seen really big shifts in the percentage of kids who can do these things in the last six years. And so, we need to ask what's going on here and what might be driving these results.
So, Yasmin. I know you wear a lot of different hats. So, you're an early childhood expert, you're a primary school teacher working in a class of 5-year-olds, and you're a mum to 4 kids. So, I am really interested in your perspectives on this.
What does this mean for children, this increase in vulnerability in language and cognitive skills?
Professor Yasmin Harman-Smith
So, Tess is right. We wouldn't expect children to come to school being able to do these things. But we see a very rapid, and I was just talking to Madeline about this, outside in the morning tea break.
We don't expect to see children starting school with these skills. But when they are starting and they are included in the classroom, they are able to engage in learning, these skills very rapidly develop in most children.
They're able to start reading simple words. They can start blending CVC sounds. Look at me knowing the education lingo, and we can see that they'll be able to start doing these things around the time that we measure the Australian Early Development Census, which is in Term 2 to 3.
And so, children who have been able to pick up their early phonics lessons have been able to engage. They will be doing these things. When children are not doing these things by Term 2 and Term 3, I would be wondering whether or not we're adequately engaging these children and meeting their educational needs.
So, we do see that on every additional domain on which a child is developmentally vulnerable, their likelihood of falling behind in their learning increases stepwise, up to over 60% of children being in a low performing NAPLAN cohort by Year 7. And this continues to Year 9. If they have 5 areas of developmental vulnerability caution, that is a very small group in this work that Tess led. But even for, you know, two or more domains, we are looking at around about, you know, 35 to 40% of children falling behind in their learning.
And when we look at, again, some work from Megan Bell, which is a linkage in WA [Western Australia], we can see that one of the key drivers of those NAPLAN results is in the language and cognitive skills domain.
So, when children are not engaging in early learning, by the time they reach reception, we need to be doing something differently.
Dr Tess Gregory
Okay, so I'm going to quickly hand back to you.
So, Yasmin, if we think about more broadly, the increases that we have seen in developmental vulnerability in New South Wales, in particular in terms of emotional maturity and language and cognitive skills, but also more broadly, what do you think might be sitting behind some of these trends?
Professor Yasmin Harman-Smith
All right, so, Tony presented a tree, which I loved, but I sit within this kind of framework thinking about the child, surrounded by their families, their communities, the systems that support them, and the policies and the National pressures and International pressures that flow through to families. And I think we're seeing that in the latest data, but also the 2021 data.
So, when we think about those kinds of things, I think about equity. I think about geographic location and how many services are available for children. I think about parents' capacity to engage with their children, and one of the things that we see a lot is the data presented on engagement parent reading to children at home and their engagement in schooling.
And I feel that those are kind of sticky indicators. Like lots of things stick to it, not because necessarily just the act of reading is good. I mean, that's great, but the serve and turn interactions that children get on a day-to-day basis are far more powerful. And when a parent isn't able to do these kinds of foundational skills with their kids, I'm wondering what else is going on for that parent?
How are they managing as a parent?
How are they managing the stresses of life?
Do they have good mental health?
Do they have resources?
Do they have support?
Are they time poor?
Do they, like me, have four children and run around working full time and do a whole pile of other things?
You know, how are we supporting families?
And then what does it mean in terms of outcomes in life?
Oh, sorry. No, that one, it was actually parental education, so get back, that's later slide.
Not well rehearsed and not pretty well slept.
So, when I think about socioeconomic disadvantage, we can see that children living in our most disadvantaged communities, the dotted line at the top, are far more likely to be developmentally vulnerable, and their trend has been trending upward over time. We've been increasing in our socioeconomic disadvantage impacts on children.
So not necessarily are we becoming poorer as a society, but our equitable outcomes as a society are reducing. That's a concern.
It's not great that we've seen an upward trend in developmental vulnerability in our least disadvantaged quintiles either. That tells me there's broader pressure. There's broader pressure on societies. We know that there's economic pressures that potentially mean more time away from kids, more time commuting. All of those kinds of things that are adding pressure to parents' time and financial stress and all those sorts of things that impact mental health and wellbeing.
When we think about geographic location, it's a similar picture. We have inequitable outcomes for kids living in different areas. But this kind of shifts over time and it bounces around, and I don't understand that. And I think that's a piece of work that needs to happen. I think you need to understand in New South Wales why sometimes kids in remote areas are doing okay and why other cohorts aren't, like what is shifting there?
Are we shifting programs, are we pulling policies in and out?
Are we trialling something and then taking it away?
Like, some of these sorts of things really start to emerge when you look at these smaller populations that have these big kinds of fluctuations.
And we do see this kind of inner regional trend across the country and in New South Wales it's emerged really clearly as well between 2018 and 2024 and lots more families kind of pushing out into inner regional areas because they can't necessarily afford to be in a metro area. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're not capable parents, but they might be struggling to make ends meet, especially then needing to commute into cities potentially to work. That reduces time. There are fewer resources in those communities, and so forth.
When we look at parental education, we see that's been improving over time in New South Wales, so that should really relate to better outcomes for children.
Parental education is a really strong predictor of children's development, why isn't that playing out?
Why is that not playing out in New South Wales?
As we're getting a more educated cohort of parents, why are we not seeing improvements in children's development?
What does that mean?
So, I think about educated parents needing to have jobs, potentially delaying childbearing and all of those kinds of things, and the ways that they play out for kids.
Regularly read to at home. So, here's my sticky indicator. In here I can see that over time in New South Wales, pressure on parents is changing. If you look at 73% of parents regularly reading to children in 2015 down to 66.8 in 2024, with the biggest drop between 2018 and 2021, that tells me pressure on parents is increasing. And I think that would be flowing through to children. I couldn't see how it wouldn't be.
Dr Tess Gregory
So, Yasmin achieving equitable Child Development across communities in Australia remains a challenge, as you've shown in some of your slides.
Since Australia started collecting this data, have we derived any insights that might help us to think as a Nation, and also within New South Wales specifically, about how we might make inroads into reducing this equity gap?
Professor Yasmin Harman-Smith
I think we have, and that's probably one of the things that is the best thing about the job I have is I get to go out and talk to communities. I get to go and learn about what people are doing in response to the data. I've had the opportunity to go and speak to schools, to communities, to remote communities, to policy makers.
And I think when we do data insight well, we have the opportunity to make an impact because we address the drivers of those developmental vulnerabilities. One of the things that we don't necessarily do all of the time is unpack what the data is telling us. We rely on the data to be the action point, and that's where I think we have the opportunity to do more.
So, in schools you are not alone, you are connected to an early childhood education and care sector, to non-government organisations, local government, community organisations, and child and family services. And it's when all of these people come together, and this is what I think Tony was talking about earlier as well, that's where the magic happens. That's where things are developed that can actually really address children's needs.
One of the things I think that we're seeing at a National level, things like foundational sports, the early years reform work, those sorts of things will start to flow through to children being better supported early on. But they won't work unless they're connected. They won't work unless governments are connected, government agencies are connected, they won't work unless there's connections at the community level.
A really interesting thing we saw in some work that happened years ago, and it was an anecdotal finding that we couldn't publish, we did some work to look at communities who were doing better than expected on the AEDC and who were doing consistently better than expected over time. And we had a research assistant who was phoning those organisations in those communities to find out what programs and supports there were.
And we thought we might find that there are, you know, a comprehensive range of supports in those communities and that's why kids were doing better.
We found that those supports existed in pretty much every community, but in the communities that she phoned where children were doing better than expected, when she spoke to somebody and she said, is there anyone else in the community I should talk to? They could point her to the other places in the community that worked with children and families. And she didn't get that kind of response in communities where their children were doing as expected or more poorly than expected.
So, it's not necessarily just what we provide, it's how we provide it and how we support families to navigate that system.
So, I think when we think about understanding what we should do at a local level, at a State level, at a National level, we need to be thinking about the AEDC alongside other data sources, which is why it's super exciting that the department has the linkages that it does.
We need to be thinking about what service providers are seeing, who are they seeing in their services?
Who are they not seeing?
Why are they not seeing them?
We need to be thinking about the experiences from a family's perspective, and that means talking to families. And we are getting so much better at co-design, but we need to get even better, and we need to get even better at doing that with First Nations communities.
We need to be listening to Elders. We need to be listening to the vision that other people have for their children, not just the vision that we have for their children. And we need to be thinking about, as Tony said, the strengths, but also the challenges.
What are those challenges and how do we address them?
I'll leave you with something that a woman in Queensland said at a forum. I was on a panel with her.
'I don't know how many times I've been offered effing Triple P, but I've done it. I don't need it. That's not what I need. I need these other things that nobody's giving me.'
And that's the kind of stuff that we really need to understand when we get to that, and we get to the drivers of vulnerability, and we can reduce that over time.
[End of transcript]
Session 5 – Christine Jackson
Session title – What skills are important for future learning.
This workshop focuses on the utility of the Australian Early Development Census data for understanding indicators of key skills, whilst also creating feed-forward opportunities for teachers to support children to reach their potential.
Watch 'What skills are important for future learning' (28:03) and access Christine Jackson AERO AEDC Research Symposium 2025 presentation (PPTX 18.8 MB).
[Video shows speaker in front of project screen and reads 'Chirstine Jackson, Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO)']
Christine Jackson
It's a pleasure to be here today amongst such wonderful, amazing presenters.
I'm very pleased to be representing AERO. For those of you who don't know who AERO is, we are the Australian Education Research Organisation. We are a ministerial owned company, governed by a board and are jointly funded by Commonwealth, State and Territory Governments. We conduct research and share knowledge to promote better education outcomes for Australian children and young people.
And today I'll be presenting on a report that I had the pleasure of being involved in and acknowledge the other people that were also involved in this report that aren't here today, and it looked at what skills are important for future literacy and numeracy learning.
But before I start, thank you very much to Lauren earlier for Welcome to Country. AERO as an organisation, we always start our meetings with paying respects to the Traditional, original owners of the land that we are on. And today's the Darug people. So, I pay my respect to those that have passed before us and to acknowledge today's Aboriginal people who are Custodians of this Land.
Just briefly what I am going to talk about today. This is a bit of an overview of the study. I'll just have a touch on the background, have a look at the project design data sources, methodologies and findings and opportunities for how we can actually think about the data that we looked at.
So firstly, the aim of the study. Our study aimed to understand how children's learning development progressed through the early years of schools. Specifically, the research examined the language, and cognitive skills children have acquired on entry to school and the relationship of those skills to later literacy and numeracy achievement.
I think that's it there now. Sorry. Yeah. I'm a bit behind.
The research questions that we focused on, we had a broad research question that started with looking at
'What is the evidence of early childhood development of language and cognitive skills that impacts children's academic achievement in later years?'
That was a broad question. It was then broken down into three sort of sub-questions, which was firstly,
'Does a child's ability to successfully complete basic and advanced literacy and basic numeracy tasks provide an indication of future performance in NAPLAN?'
Question 2 was looking at
'How do the responses to the items from the language and cognitive skills domain within the AEDC demonstrate a sequenced progression of early literacy and number skill acquisition on a progressive scale?'
And lastly,
'Does the progression of language and cognitive skills align to the Australian Curriculum for English and Maths and the National Literacy and Numeracy Learning Progressions?'
So, just to give you a bit of context, and I probably don't need to go over this too much. Often, we have audiences that need to unpack this, but I'm sure you are all very aware of what the AEDC data is. That was one of the ones that we were looking at. And obviously, the NAPLAN, which is a regular snapshot every year for targeted Year levels, measures children's learning progress in literacy and numeracy and is done in 3, 5, 7, and 9.
I guess in a similar way, NAPLAN assessments to the AEDC does provide that regular snapshot, and it consists of literacy and numeracy tests, which I think you're probably all aware of. Reading, writing, language, conventions and numeracy. So that was the context of where we started.
But I'm going to draw a little bit on the literature to start with and ask the question,
'What do we know about foundational literacy and numeracy skills before I dive into the analysis of the data?'
So, research by he and colleagues has stated that
'The critical window for the development of early literacy and numeracy skills is before children arrive at school; hence major differences in early academic learning and behavioural regulation skills can emerge at preschool or school entry.'
The notion of foundational numeracy and literacy skills being developed in the early childhood period before school, starting school, has been further supported elsewhere as well.
Children's ability as they enter school then are key factors in setting their academic trajectories and may have implication across the life course. And Yasmin and Tess talked about the Brinkman study in 2013.
But furthermore, engagement in formal Preschool programs has been found to be associated with high performance in middle childhood NAPLAN results. So, recognising these implications for children learning presents a unique opportunity to provide support early. It also sheds a light on the mechanisms of learning through understanding the ways in which the attainment of early skills sets a child up for learning more advanced skills. This provides a clearer evidence-based roadmap for improving children's learning outcomes.
So, what's the role of schools and the Curriculum?
So formal schooling nurtures children's literacy and numeracy skills and provides the bridge between children's ability to apply skills learned in the home and in ECEC settings to those in which they've had no exposure until they've arrived at Primary School.
Particularly formal schooling provides an opportunity for all children to move from biologically primary literacy and numeracy skills. So, vocabulary development and visual spatial processing, which can be acquired through experiences and responsive interactions to biologically secondary skills. For example, meta-linguistic awareness and symbolic numerical processing which must be explicitly taught.
The Australian Curriculum from the foundation year through the primary years, along with the national literacy, numeracy learning progression maps the development of biologically secondary skills to enable literacy and numeracy development.
So, as part of our work, we were looking at aligning the AEDC Australian Curriculum. I'm just going to call it the NLNLP, because that's a bit quicker than saying National Literacy and Numeracy Learning Progression. You know what I'm talking about. So, what we were doing is looking at linking those three elements, and also to consider what are the implications for teaching and learning. So, this report through our analysis does demonstrate there is alignment between the questions in the AEDC and these key Curriculum documents.
Our Project Design, Data Sources and Methodology. Now, I've talked about this all a little bit before, but just to sort of build on this a little bit, is that we had a sample size. We used the LSAC data to look at the linking between AEDC and NAPLAN. Our sample was 2,459 children who started school in 2009. And we also then mapped that with the five key domains and looked at how that connected to NAPLAN in Years 3 and Year 5.
Using the linked AEDC and NAPLAN data, the analysis identified the foundational aspects of literacy and numeracy included in the AEDC that are the strongest predictors of future academic performance in reading, writing, and numeracy as assessed by NAPLAN. The analysis was also used to establish a platform of basic and advanced literacy and numeracy progression before linking this to indicators of success in NAPLAN literacy and numeracy performance.
This study provided an opportunity to consider the utility of the AEDC data, not just as a means for system and community feedback, but as a means to feed forward as we take into account the key skill indicators of future literacy and numeracy success beyond the school's foundation year.
The alignment also provided an opportunity to consider the relevance of this data set in the context of the classroom. It also outlines the skills that children starting school find easier compared with those that are identified here as being more challenging.
So, the research was a mixed methods approach to analysis, and it was implemented across four stages, both quantitative and qualitative. The first one was a Stage 1 of structural equation modelling, and this was used to predict Year 3 and 5 outcomes using the AEDC domain and sub-domain scores.
The aim of Stage 1 of the analysis was to understand the predictive pathways from the AEDC domains and representing the skills attained in early childhood to reading and numeracy results in Years 3 and 5 as assessed by NAPLAN.
Stage 2 of the analysis was to address research question two by building an understanding of the measurement properties of the instrument for each of the five AEDC domains. The rush modelling was used to understand the relative difficulty of the AEDC items.
Stage 3 was a multi-level modelling and used to predict Year 3 outcomes using individual AEDC items. The aim of this stage was to connect the understandings gained about items belonging to the AEDC language and cognitive skills domain in Stage 2 with a STEM analysis, predicting NAPLAN outcomes in Stage 1.
The relationship of interest was those pertaining between AEDC language and cognitive skills domain items, and the Year 3 NAPLAN results.
And lastly, the final step was used to address Research Question 3. Looking at the qualitative techniques to align the items to the Australian Curriculum.
To this end, Stage 4 link strongly to evidence from Stage 2 Rasch modelling and evidence from Stage 3, regarding the predictive powers of specific AEDC items with respect to NAPLAN outcomes.
So, the report does build on previous analysis which demonstrated the relationship between AEDC and the reading and numeracy skills in 3, 5, 7, and 9 when used in conjunction with NAPLAN data. But we went one step further because we use writing as part of the analysis as well.
The Findings. So, apologies for this next hectic slide. I have the statisticians to thank for this, but this is basically unpacking the connection between the AEDC items and the fact that there was an impact on improvement in connection to Year 3 NAPLAN reading. This also was replicated in numeracy as well, but I'm just going to show you the reading one today.
So, the first set of SEM models indicated Year 3 NAPLAN results using a combination of AEDC domains and demographic and school variables. Results for the models pertaining to reading and numeracy were similar, like I said. So, I'm just showing you this figure.
So, this diagram essentially means that children who identified on the AEDC as having stronger language and cognitive skills achieve better results on their Year 3 NAPLAN test. The results also showed that children from higher Ixia schools had higher achievement levels on Year 3 reading in NAPLAN. The communication skills and general knowledge domain score was the 2nd strongest AEDC predictor of Year 3 reading. And together with language and cognitive skills served as a mediator for the other 3 AEDC domains indirect impact on this outcome.
Now this is one about Year 5, and I am showing you the numeracy one in this instance. So, this one shows a predicted Year 5 NAPLAN results using Year 3 NAPLAN results with a combination of AEDC domain scores and demographic variables. And it's based on the results of the imputed data from the previous slide.
So, as with the SEM models I've just described, the AEDC domains of language and cognitive skills and communication skills in general knowledge showed the strongest impact on NAPLAN numeracy outcomes, both at Year 3 and Year 5 level. This model also showed that both language and cognitive skills and communication skills and general knowledge influence Year 5 numeracy in 2 ways.
Indirectly by strongly affecting Year 3 numeracy, which then predicted Year 5 results. And directly, they also had their own separate effect on Year 5 numeracy, not just through Year 3.
So, in summary. All domains by the AEDC are related to Year 3 and Year 5 NAPLAN performance. A range of skills and capabilities are all of them contributed to children's literacy and numeracy success in Primary School. The skills and capabilities that children can demonstrate the beginning of school significantly predict their academic level of achievement 3 years later.
So, children's performance in Year 5 NAPLAN can be traced not only to their achievement levels in Year 3, but also to independent effects from the skills and capability they were able to demonstrate five years earlier at the start of school.
So, this analysis sheds a light in a new way on the continuing importance of early skills development as a child grows, and the ways in which these skills and capabilities set children up for acquiring new skills in the future.
So, in summary. Early skills are important for setting a child up as I said. Communication skills and general knowledge and language and cognitive skills have an effect directly on Year 5 outcomes, which is an addition to the effect that runs through Year 3 to Year 5 achievement. And communication skills and general knowledge and language and cognitive skills at the start of full-time school predict academic achievement in Year 3, which in turn predicts academic achievement in Year 5.
Now I'm going to move to Stage 2, which is where the Rasch Methodology started to come in. And this becomes really interesting when we start to put it on a scale in terms of easier items and more challenging items.
So, linking these findings to skill progressions add another element to the investigation. As can be seen, the further along the difficulty scale a skill appears, the more advanced the skill. To demonstrate competence in the most advanced item, which I know Yasmin and Tess were talking about earlier, read complex words. Children may need to learn the prize skills along the progression to build the foundation for reading complex words.
But of course, children's learning is not a uniform progression. Some children may leap ahead, skipping skills, plateauing, regress and speed up again in the learning. Nonetheless, a child's ability to read complex words develop through their ability to understand the phonetic properties of words influence all 3 areas of Year 3 NAPLAN.
Helping children move from foundational skills towards more advanced skills for more advanced skills is important for later achievement. However, the analysis conducted here shows that there are bigger gaps in difficulty between some literacy and numeracy skills compared to others. The analysis of the AEDC items highlight some significant leaps in developmental skills, which can be seen.
Of the 26 skills tested within the AEDC language and cognitive skills, Domain 8 was shown to have the highest correlation with successful NAPLAN performance in Year 3 across numeracy, reading and writing.
And these are the eight indicators. Now, probably what's interesting to note is that they're not all advanced.
Reading complex words is there, but attaching sounds to letters, identifying some letters of the alphabet, writing his or her own name in English, aware of writing directions are also indicators.
So, the top 5 to have found the strongest correlation with high NAPLAN performance. As I said, are not always the most difficult skills. This finding highlights two things. It highlights the importance of the foundational skills for future learning success, and also the fact that not all children start school with these foundational skills.
But both of these findings are relevant for teachers as they work to establish and further develop children's foundational skills. And I think to be honest, that it's exciting because it means that these are non-insurmountable. By having these skills which are opportunities explicitly to be taught how will have an impact on their future performance in school.
Our analysis also showed that apart from a small number of exceptions, the order in which children acquire foundational skills identified by the AEDC follow the same pattern identified by the Curriculum and the NLNLP. This alignment may be useful for teachers to more easily identify the next step in a child's learning.
If a child cannot yet demonstrate a skill in the AEDC, the teacher can locate the skill within the Australian Curriculum and the progressions, to consider the next step teaching for the child. All indicators in basic literacy, numeracy, and advanced literacy aligned to all these Curriculum documents.
I did have this little square here because this was something that we found interesting, in terms of the progression. As indicated before, sometimes the basic literacy skills the students had found a little bit more challenging than what was indicated by the advanced skill.
So, as part of our work, we have created a cognitive skill map that aligned all the AEDC items to the Curriculum and the progressions. And where children are unable to meet the AEDC indicators, they can use this to identify and actively teach the observable and measurable literacy and numeracy skills to each of these indicators.
So, using this skill map in conjunction with AERO's Learning and Teaching Model, support a targeted approach to teaching these skills. So AERO, we have developed a model that aligns key ideas on the student learning processes with implications for practice. The model is underpinned by these pedagogical approaches, such as explicit instruction, formative assessment, and mastery learning, and the model recognises that all students benefit from practice that align with the mechanisms of memory that allow for acquiring, retaining, retrieving, and consolidating learning.
Key elements of student learning are on the left-hand side of the model, and read horizontally this model links elements of student learning processes to associated teaching practices in 4 key areas.
So, in summary. All 5 domains assessed by the AEDC are related to Year 3 and 5 NAPLAN performance. The skills children are already able to demonstrate at the beginning of school, significantly predict their performance 3 years later. Children's performance in NAPLAN at Year 5 can be traced back not only to their performance in Year 3, but to five years earlier at the start of school.
Number 2, the language and cognitive domain of the AEDC has the strongest positive association with children's academic performance in Year 3 with additional and sustained impact into Year 5, the language and cognitive skills domain. Consists of four subdomains, basic literacy, advanced literacy, basic numeracy and interest in literacy, numeracy and memory performance in basic literacy and basic numeracy significantly explained Year 3, reading outcomes with small to medium effect sizes. Number 3 a set of 8 skills from the language and cognitive skills domain was shown to have a strong correlation with NAPLAN performance in Year 3 across numeracy, reading and writing. The analysis showed that children entering primary school who acquired these skills were more likely to experience future literacy and numeracy success through the prime years.
And the 8 skills as I had before was recognising numbers 1 to 10. Reading complex words, counting to 20, remembering things easily. Attach sounds to letters. Use one-to-one correspondence. Write his or her own name in English, and aware of writing directions in English. Number 4, the early skills that predict later high performance are not all advanced skills.
Of the 26 skills within the AEDC, language and skill, cognitive skills domain, the top 5 to have the most strongest correlation with each NAPLAN test domain were not always the most difficult items. This highlights the need for achieving basic skills in order to progress to more advanced literacy and numeracy skills.
Number 5. The progression of Early Literacy, Numeracy, and Cognitive Skills as derived from the analysis the AEDC language and cognitive skill domain items aligns with the Australian Curriculum and the progressions. This means that apart from minor exceptions, the pattern of the acquisition of the foundation skills identified by the AEDC follows the same pattern identified by the Australian Curriculum and the progressions.
And lastly, the skill indicators in the AEDC language and cognitive skill domain do not distinguish between developmental levels as well as the indicators belonging to the other domains. Now, this finding is important as further analysis highlights that for children at the high end of the developmental scale, the AEDC sometimes is a bit of a blunt instrument and does not have a granular indicator of more advanced literacy and numeracy skills.
A few things for consideration. Given the significance of language and cognitive and communication skills to influence the child's schooling achievement, there is potential for a greater focus on targeting these skills in the early years of schooling. Developing children's skills also in social competence, emotional maturity and physical wellbeing is also important. These skills indirectly contribute to children developing and mastering language and cognition and communication skills that directly impact later literacy and numeracy achievement.
Of consideration also is the importance of formative assessment. It's important to understand what flow and effects might be seen as children progress through school based on their level of developmental vulnerability in their starting year. Critically early assessment of children entering school should be further supported with targeted ongoing formative assessment.
Formative assessment combined with other evidence-based practices such as explicit instruction and mastery learning are the most consistently effective teaching practices to support all children, including vulnerable children, to achieve benchmark literacy and numeracy. Formative assessment is essential to identify prior learning and progress and to monitor any gaps in learning that need to be addressed.
In summary, linked AEDC and NAPLAN data provide a powerful data asset, allowing researchers to analyse children's learning over time and providing important contextual information about the child's background characteristics when they start school and as they move through schooling. The research that is reported here builds on the work by Brinkman by looking at the language and cognitive skill domains of the AEDC in the context of a linked data set containing all the AEDC and NAPLAN domains.
In doing this, the study takes a granular look at the items within the language and cognitive skills domain, specifically to understand how particular skills might predict later NAPLAN achievement. The creation of language and cognition skill progression scale, and the subsequent alignment to the Curriculum and the progressions is an important acknowledgement of the potential of the data to feed forward to inform teaching and learning.
And lastly, a clear outcome of the analysis was demonstrating that skills that children develop in their first year of schooling are associated with NAPLAN reading and writing scores in Year 3 with sustained and additional impact into Year 5. A focus on these early skills in the early years of school is important because they predict later importance. So, we should make sure that all children have this knowledge. These skills are not always the most complex or challenging, but they will have an impact on student performance later on.
Before I just finish off, I do want to draw your attention to the other work that is happening in AERO. And I know that there was a question during the previous session around this, but other findings from the AEDC, there's been two reports that have been published and I think Bridget Healey, who's online, is one of the leads in this, but it was linking quality and child development in ECEC.
And promoting equity for multilingual children through ECEC and some of the findings here are up on the slides. But in summary, there is evidence from this report that children who attend high quality ECEC are less likely to be developmentally vulnerable, but I encourage you to have a look at this report. And then there was also a report that looked at children who attended Preschool generally do better overall in AEDC results than those that don't.
But have a look on our website, we have a number of great research and resources that are currently there, in this space as well.
That's it there. And I think that will be it for me.
So, thank you very much for the opportunity to present today. It's been a pleasure to be here.
[End of transcript]
Session 6 – Professor Kristin Laurens
Session title – Student mental health and wellbeing: findings from the NSW Child Development Study.
This presentation describes findings from the NSW Child Development Study, a research project that has followed the development of a population cohort of 96,000 children up to the age of 19 years. These were children for whom teachers completed the Australian Early Development Census (AEDC) in 2009 during their first year of full-time school, and who self-reported on their mental health and wellbeing during their final year of primary school (Year 6) in 2015 via the Middle Childhood Survey (MCS).
This presentation describes the identification of three different ‘risk profiles’ of developmental vulnerability at age 5 using AEDC data which increase the risk for later childhood mental health disorders (between ages 6–12 years) relative to children without these risk profiles.
The presentation describes social-emotional skills that contribute to students’ progress in reading and numeracy attainment between Kindergarten to Year 7, demonstrating the role of students’ self-awareness and self-management at age 11 years (using MCS data) in supporting achievement. Findings emphasise the important dual role of educators in supporting students’ mental health alongside their academic attainment.
Watch 'Student mental health and wellbeing: findings from the NSW Child Development Study' (30:47) and access Professor Kristin Laurens AEDC Research Symposium 2025 presentation (PPTX 21.5 MB).
[Video shows speaker in front of project screen and reads 'Professor Kristin Laurens, Queensland University of Technology']
Kristine Laurens
Thanks very much and thank you to Tony and Mary and the team for inviting me to speak today and share some of the findings from our New South Wales Child Development Study. Particularly those examining the links between children's early development as measured by the Australian Early Development Census and their later mental health and wellbeing outcomes.
And like the other speakers, I would also like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the Land that we are meeting on today, the Burramattagal Land of the Dharug people and pay my respect to Elders past, present, and emerging. And I'd also like to acknowledge the Turrbal / Yuggera peoples of the Land on which I live and work, Meanjin in Brisbane. And also, to the Traditional Custodians, the lands that you are joining us from today.
And also acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the audience today. Thank you for your contribution today.
So, today I'm going to be sharing with you some of the findings from the New South Wales Child Development Study, and I do that on behalf of a large team of researchers, and graduate students based across Universities at UNSW, at QUT and at Griffith University.
And Professor Melissa Green who leads the team there at UNSW and the New South Wales Child Development Study was going to share the presentation with me here today. She regrets that she has to go to regional New South Wales today, and so couldn't be here, but does send her greetings to you.
So, I'm going to cover some ground today, and in the first part of the talk, I'm going to be presenting the information that Melissa would've shared with you as it's work that she led a bit earlier on in the New South Wales Child Development Study.
And I'll also be featuring some of the work that Felicity Harris completed as she undertook her PhD while being project coordinator on our project.
And so that's the work where we really make use of the multi-dimensional information that the AEDC provides regarding early developmental vulnerabilities and look at how those relate to children's later use of hospital and health services for mental health problems.
And then I'm going to go on to describe Felicity's work that shows us how that AEDC information can actually be used then to inform the provision of local placed base services and support so that we can try and prevent or intervene early for child mental disorders.
Then I'm going to go on to describe some of the work that I've been leading at QUT and here I'd like to acknowledge Dr Emma Carpendale. Some of the work that I'll be presenting was the focus of her PhD work with me.
And here I'm going to cover a suite of studies where we used AEDC data as part of our investigation of how social emotional skills for students, the role that they play in supporting students learning in reading and numeracy, right from their first year of full-time schooling.
And for the educators and policy makers in the audience, I really hope that those data that I'm going to share with you really convince you or reinforce to you that value and how much value actually developing those and teaching those social emotional skills alongside literacy and numeracy, brings great outcomes for the kids.
And so, for a bit of context, as I've said, all the information that I'm sharing with you today comes from the New South Wales Child Development Study, and this is a statewide study that follows the development of a population cohort of kids. And these are the children that were assessed as they entered school on the AEDC in 2009.
And so, we followed them longitudinally. And when those children arrived at Year 6, their final year of Primary School, in collaboration with the Public Sector and also the Catholic and Independent Sectors, we worked with 829 Public, Catholic and Independent Primary Schools in New South Wales to deliver a Middle Childhood Survey.
So, this was a self-report survey, by the Year 6 students of their mental health and wellbeing.
And on top of that we had 600 primary principals from those schools agree to complete a survey for us that also told us a little bit about what their school was doing to promote students' mental health and wellbeing. And we then linked those data, the AEDC and our survey data together with records from Government Departments, be that Education, Health, Child Protection, Police, Criminal Justice and Welfare Agencies. So, bringing a very rich set of data together to follow the children over time.
And for most of the cohort, for about 75 - 77,000, of the 90,000 kids that we follow, we also were able to link selected records for mums and dads.
Now, the linkage of survey data is undertaken for us by the Centre of Health Record Linkage, and we as researchers receive only de-identified data. And there are strict ethical conditions around how we use and report that data.
So, if you are interested in sort of reading a bit more about how the study works and the wealth of data sets we link, I refer you to our New South Wales Child Development Study website where you'll be able to access a copy of this recent publication.
And also, you'll be able to access this publication from the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, which just really sort of gives you more information about the findings that I'm going to be describing in the first part of the talk today.
So, in this publication, we used information about the early developmental vulnerabilities from that 2009 AEDC.
And so that's where we were focusing on those scores in the lowest 10% of functioning according to the National data, but here, rather than using the 5 domains of the AEDC, we drilled down that little bit further and went to the 16 sub-domains, that underpin those 5 developmental domains to really exploit that multi-dimensional nature of the data.
And so, just to recap then the other presentations have covered this ground already, but you can see that there are the 4 sub-domains within the social competence domain. Also 4 from emotional maturity. 4 from language and cognitive skills and then 3 from the physical health and wellbeing, plus the communication and general knowledge domain. And those are the 16 sub-domains that we're taking into our analysis.
And here we use a technique called Latent Class Analysis, which is a fancy sort of technique to really look at how patterns or to find patterns in the early developmental vulnerabilities across those 16 subdomains and look at how they group together in that whole population cohort.
And so, amongst the 87,000 kids that we had AEDC data for in 2009, how do those subdomains pattern together in terms of the early vulnerabilities that kids are showing?
And we found 4 different patterns in the data.
Now, here's a busy slide for you. Let me try and unpack it for you. So, there along the bottom on the X axis, that's where we've mapped out our 16 different subdomains.
And then up on the left, on the Y axis, we are plotting the probability of a child in that profile or that pattern that I talked about to experience the developmental vulnerability on that subdomain. So, if you look at the red line at the top, and this accounted for 4% of our children, you can see that those children have a high probability of experiencing vulnerability across all 16 of those subdomains. And we called this a pervasive risk profile, okay? Because they were very likely to experience, vulnerability across all 16 subdomains.
Now compare that to the group hiding right at the bottom there. That's the black line, the black dash line. And that actually captures three quarters or 77% of the kids in the sample.
And these are what we call our no risk group because they had essentially no or very low risk of presenting developmental vulnerability on any of those 16 sub-domains.
And then you can see a profile marked in blue, which included 7% of kids in the cohort. And these kids had a very high probability of experiencing vulnerability on 3 particular sub-domains.
And they were aggressive behaviour, high proactive and inattentive behaviour, and responsibility and respect. And then their probability across those other domains were low to moderate. And so, we called this profile the Misconduct Risk Profile.
And finally, in green you can see a profile that represented about 12% of children in the population. And here you can see that kids have a low to moderate probability of experiencing vulnerability across 15 of the 16 subdomains. They don't have risk on aggressive behaviour, but everything else, there's this, sort of low signal.
And so, our next step was to take these 4 different profiles and then look at the likelihood that children in a particular profile would then show up in our hospital and health records with mental health diagnoses.
So, this figure here shows the percentage of kids in each risk profile who later, so now we're looking between the ages of 6 and 13 years, showed up in our health records with mental health diagnoses. So here any diagnosis, you can see that about 10% of kids in the pervasive risk profile had a later diagnosis between 6 and 13 years of age.
Now mental health diagnoses were next, most prevalent among children in the misconduct risk profile, where 7% had a diagnosis. Almost 6% of kids in the mild generalised risk profile had a diagnosis and about 4% of children in the no risk profile.
And so, we wanted to test the relationship between the risk profiles and those later mental health diagnoses. And really sort of think about, or we talk about the results in terms of how likely those 3 higher risk profiles are to experience mental health presentations, for mental health problems, then, or compared to children in that no risk profile. So, the kids with the no risk profile are providing our reference group, if you will.
And so, we look at the chance of the pervasive misconduct and mild generalised risk profiles relative to the chance amongst the no risk group. And what we could see is that, oh, I should mention, sorry, that we also controlled for a number of factors that also increased risk of mental disorder for children, and those were socioeconomic disadvantage, being involved with Child Protection Services, having a parent or parents with mental health problems. And we also control gender because there are gender patterns in this as well.
So what we saw was that after considering or adjusting for those other factors that also play a role, we saw that both the pervasive and the misconduct risk profiles were twice as likely or had a 100% bigger chance, if you like, of having a mental health diagnosis in health records than the children in the no risk group. And children in the mild generalised risk group had about a 20% bigger chance.
So, this slide now breaks it down by the types of disorder. Before we were just looking at any mental health disorder, now we're looking at particular types. And here you can see again the data controlling for those other factors that may contribute. And the bars here represent the odds of a kid in those 3 higher risk profile groups relative to kids in the no risk group to show the different diagnosis types, between the age of 6 and 13 years.
And what you can see is that across all the different types of disorder, kids in that Pervasive Risk Group and the Misconduct Risk Group was statistically significantly more likely to have those mental health problems than kids in the no risk group.
The only statistically significant difference for the mild generalised risk group relative to the no risk group was in the developmental disorders.
So, it was across the board for Pervasive and Misconduct Risk Profiles, but there were particularly pronounced effects for developmental disorders, for hyperkinetic disorders, so that's your attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders and for conduct disorders during that 6-to-13-year age period.
Now for those interested, there were also strong relationships, of course, between Child Protection Services involvement, parental mental health, sorry, parental mental illness, and being a boy and the different types of disorder.
So, as I mentioned, Felicity Harris then led some work that mapped the percentage of children in those pervasive and misconduct profiles to each local Government area in New South Wales.
And the multidimensional information provided by the AEDC, really allowed us to look by mapping these risk profiles to look at where you might want to concentrate or build up resources to try and support or prevent later mental health problems in middle childhood and adolescence.
And so, what you can see is that in the darker areas there in the map, that's where you might want to be putting additional investment, not only in Childhood Mental Health Services because you know that there's going to be increased risk there, but also of course, in your schools. In schools in the areas with high numbers of kids in those two risk profiles, they might be schools where you particularly invest in programs that support kids, who are at risk of mental health problems. And those schools might also, of course, benefit from placement of allied health professionals or strong links with allied health professionals, in those areas.
So just to recap from the first part of the talk, that multidimensional information from the AEDC allows us to distinguish 4 different profiles of early development vulnerability that have different levels of risk for later mental health problems in middle childhood and adolescence, and children with patterns of early developmental vulnerabilities characteristic of the Pervasive and the Misconduct Risk Profiles have that significantly increased risk of mental health problems across a whole range of diagnoses later on.
And mapping the prevalence of those profiles to geographic areas helps identify where we might want to bolster the local supports to prevent those mental health problems rising.
So now I'm going to get on to the work that we've done using AEDC data in combination with data from our Middle Childhood Survey, the self-report of mental health and wellbeing that children completed in Year 6 of Primary School. And also, in our linkage of that data with the NAPLAN data that you've already heard from our other speakers about.
So, in this work, we were really interested in the role that social emotional skills play in supporting students learning, in reading and numeracy.
And so of course we've heard today. Oh, sorry. It looks like the slides are stepped out ones, apologies.
You know, you've already heard, from our previous speakers quite nicely the evidence around how those early language and cognitive skills measured on the AEDC relate to children's later NAPLAN outcomes, in Year 3, 5 and 7. And we've also shown similar effects in, in the New South Wales data.
Sorry.
And of course, you know, we now have quite a bit of investment going into early childhood to try and help kids with this successful transition to school. And I guess, what I'm interested in is that we can see that, you know, about 13 to 18% of this later reading and numeracy performance is explained by these school entry skills, but that leaves about 80%. That what are schools doing that's actually, you know, encouraging this learning. And that's where I was really interested in focusing on what are these other factors that might contribute. And what we can see is that there are these other non-cognitive factors such as social emotional skills that make a contribution here.
And so here I'm talking about skills that students develop in terms of recognising and regulating their emotions and their behaviours and in building positive relationships with their peers and their teachers, that really support their ability to engage effectively with their learning at school.
So, its looking like students social emotional skills influence each other actually in a sort of bi-directional or reciprocal way. And that really highlights that important role for educators in developing these skills in an integrated way through Primary School and into High School.
And so, we were interested in our work at kind of looking at the interplay between these things over time. And in particular, what I was interested to know was, you know, how much are social emotional skills of children contributing to later literacy and numeracy outcomes. In terms of that pathway from early literacy and numeracy skills to later literacy skills. So how much is a direct route from early to later literacy and numeracy skills, and how much might be actually going through their development of these social and emotional skills.
So, in Australia, the personal and social capability within the Australian curriculum actually outlines 4 social and emotional competencies that all students are supposed to be taught and develop in their learning at school. And in our study, we particularly focused here on the self-awareness and self-management competencies.
So, self-awareness sort of being that ability of students to understand their strengths and limitations and have confidence that they can achieve their goals and self-management being that ability to handle their thoughts, their feelings, their behaviours in different situations. And we'd focused on these ones because we have shown in a recent study that the high levels of these two particular skills in Year 6 are what is particularly linked to their Year 7 literacy and numeracy over that transition that can be quite challenging into the High School years.
So, what I would do, we tried to make this a much more accessible version than the papers that sit behind it. But we'd had a recent article in the conversation that I would encourage you to go and have a look if you're interested in some of the work that we've done in this area. Because in that article we really summarised some of the key findings relating to how schools can actually develop these social and emotional competencies to support students' learning.
And in particular, we feature the research where we use the information that about 560 Public Catholic and Independent Primary School Principals provided about what social emotional learning programs they were delivering in their schools and looking at how that related to the actual social and emotional competencies, that students of the, you know, I think it was about 18,600 students in that analysis, what competencies they showed.
And in fact, here's the key finding from that research. So here, if you look at the red bar, that's the overall sort of summary of the significant relationship that we see between delivery of Social Emotional Learning Programs that explicitly teach these skills in structured sessions in school, and the 4 competencies from the Australian curriculum.
But actually, there's a real sting in the tail here because if you drill down further, there's a really important finding. The green bars are what happens when you are delivering non evidenced base Social Emotional Learning Programs. So, if they've never been tested or if they've been tested and show no effectiveness, your effect on social emotional skills is negligible.
In fact, you're probably wasting the time when you could be delivering something better because the effect in the blue bar there is what you see if you focus down on the programs that have actually been evidenced to be, to shown to be effective.
And there you see, gains in student skills and they're about 7 to 10 percentiles better. Students who receive programs, their social emotional skills compared to students that don't receive the programs.
So, coming back to the effect on the academic achievement. I mentioned that we'd shown how that information on self-awareness and self-management linked to Year 7 literacy and numeracy. And so, what we saw that self-awareness actually accounted for between 17 and 26% of the variance in Year 7 literacy and numeracy. So that's basically saying that about a quarter of the variability amongst students in their Year 7 achievement is related to these earlier skills in self-awareness.
The effect for self-management is more subtle. It explains a small but still significant amount at about 4% of that later literacy and numeracy. And so, what we did was want to bring the AEDC back in here now and look, okay, we know the AEDC learning, the language and cognitive skills domain, it predicts as Christine's shown quite a lot of what you look like later and we can see that in our data and predicts the Year 7 NAPLAN.
Well, how much might this be operating through these two social emotional competencies?
And so, what we've done is obviously take our language and cognitive skills domain from the AEDC in 2009. We've taken the self-awareness and self-management in Year 6, the last year of Primary School from our Middle Childhood Survey, and we've taken their Year 7 reading and numeracy test scores, standardised test scores from the NAPLAN assessments, and we've done this for over 20,000 students from over 620 schools.
And what we see is that overall, about 12 to 25% of students, Year 7 reading and numeracy achievement was explained by our models. So, we couldn't explain everything, but we could explain up to about a quarter of the effect, and those are meaningful sorts of effects.
Now for self-awareness about approximately a third of that effect that we're explaining, actually operated through their self-awareness. So basically, in part, the school entry cognitive skills were influencing academic achievement through their middle childhood self-awareness. And so, experiencing early academic success is perhaps building this sense of academic self-efficacy and self-confidence that supports kids to apply themselves to their learning and persevere in the face of challenges. And that, of course, then boost their subsequent academic performance. So, there's this interplay between the two.
Now, by comparison, self-management actually explained only a small proportion of that, and I would say not really meaningful. It was only about a 4% effect of that relationship between early and later academic achievement. But that's not to say that it's not actually important because it was making independent contributions to those things. So, the clear message really is that both of those things contribute independently to those later NAPLAN reading and numeracy outcomes.
And so that's that real encouragement then to encourage educators to be investing time in explicitly teaching and modelling and delivering this skills learning in social and emotional competencies to children alongside the teaching that they're delivering in reading, in numeracy, in subject knowledge.
Of course there were limitations to our work, you know, in terms of what we're, you know, tapping into when we measure these social emotional skills. You know, we weren't able to dive deeply into that. So, there are aspects of that that we are not measuring well, which we'll explain some of the effect that we're not capturing. But of course, there's also things that we're not capturing that are contributing to the models as well.
And of course, the long period of time between AEDC and Year 7 means, you know, we're not talking about, we can't claim to say that this is cause and effect. You know, there are other factors not assessed that will be contributing in there as well.
But what the findings do do, is really help us understand how those early skills are linked to later skills and some of the mechanisms contributing to that. And we could see that part of that was going through that academic self-confidence or self-awareness from the kids. But both that self-awareness and that self-management were having direct contributions to children's academic achievement separate to the effects that their earlier achievement had.
And delivery of both Early Childhood Programs to bolster those early schools, but also delivery of programs in Primary Schools is really important in terms of developing those skills alongside each other in an integrated way to try and maximise children's outcomes.
And so really, I'd just like to close with the acknowledgement of the many data custodians who very kindly review publications and presentations and things like that before we actually share them with the general public.
So, I acknowledge the contribution of their time and also acknowledge the contribution of Funders to the work. We've had National Health and Medical Research Council funding. We've had ARC, Australian Research Council funding, Medical Research Future funding, and of course key partnerships either in kind or cash support from Government partners.
And I'd like to acknowledge our New South Wales Department of Education colleagues, from Ministry of Health and also Department of Communities and Justice for the longstanding relationships that have meant that not only could we do this research, but actually really make an effort to try and get it back out to users on the ground and disseminate that knowledge back out.
So really do appreciate and thank you again for the opportunity to share the findings with you today.
[End of transcript]
Session 7 – Professor Sharon Goldfeld
Session title – Beyond the silver bullet – closing the equity gap for children within a generation.
In the past decade, there has been a great global effort to support children’s health, development, and well-being. Evidence shows that strategic investments in early childhood are imperative for averting the onset of health challenges and mitigating their societal impacts. Despite the evidence and investments, inequities persist in early childhood outcomes due to preventable social, economic, or geographic factors.
This session explores these systemic inequities and their impact on budgets, the productivity of society at large, and in delivering on greater human capital.
Australian children have had a disadvantaged trajectory in early childhood outcomes. Nevertheless, with the proper political will and resource commitments, Australia could close the child equity gap within a generation.
Watch the prerecorded session 'Beyond the silver bullet – closing the equity gap for children within a generation' (40:15) and access Professor Sharon Goldfeld AEDC Research Symposium 2025 presentation (PDF 7 MB).
[Video opens with Sharon seated centre and screen reads 'Professor Sharon Goldfield, Centre for Community Child Health']
Sharon Goldfield
Hello everybody.
I'm so sorry I'm not able to actually join you in real life, but I'm very excited to bring you this presentation around 'Beyond the Silver Bullet'.
And let me change this next bit to a question. Can we close the equity gap for children within a generation?
Let me just start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land, at least that I'm on, which is the Wurunjeri people of the Kulin nation, and to pay my respect to Elders past, present, and emerging on this wonderful unseeded land and in particular, any First Nations people who are here with us today.
So, I thought I'd start with what this is all about, which is the children themselves.
[Video cuts to children playing and upbeat music plays]
Child 1
What makes you feel happy?
Child 2
What makes you feel happy Henry?
Child 3
Chocolate.
Child 4
Sorry and?
Child 5
A lollipop.
Child 6
Cauliflower
Adult
Cauliflower makes you happy?
Child 7
Doing art, going to the pools.
Child 8
Playing with my sister.
Child 9
I love jumping on my trampoline.
Child 10
My favourite one, I love going to ballet and I love playing creepy uppy with my Kiara.
Child 11
Playing soccer. Scoring goals.
Child 12
Playing games.
Child 13
Playing the hockey game.
Child 14
Playing with my family and friends.
Child 15
We build trucks.
Child 16
All the friends in my Kinder are kind to me. And I like that. That makes me happy.
[Video ccuts back to Sharon]
Sharon Goldfield
Well, I hope you enjoyed that.
I wanted to centre us about children. Because after all, you're getting a whole lot of results today, and it's about research, but I think we can all agree it's really about children. So, in doing that, I just want to bring forth the kind of different truths we have to hold when we are thinking about children.
The first is this idea of the end of one. Now, I'm a paediatrician. I'm a practitioner. I still see kids. My specialty is poo. I'm not sure where lunch is in terms of this presentation, but hopefully that's okay. And so of course we really care about the end of one and what happens to single children in single families.
But at the same time, we're also trying to work out how do we keep populations of children healthy and developing well? And of course, this is where the Australian Early Development Census really comes into play.
So, I'm going to be talking to you about those things. How do we think about the end of one, and then how do we keep populations of children healthy?
So, let's zoom out a little bit and think about ourselves in a global context.
So, you'll probably recognise these, they're various UNICEF innocenti reports. They're put out regularly, and you can see the unfair start, which is about inequalities, child poverty, and then worlds of influence is actually about education.
And the little flashing arrows is where Australia is compared to other countries, mostly high income countries. And I think you could probably see even from the back of the room that we are not doing so well. So even though Australia is one of the top 15 richest countries in the world, we are in the more or less, the bottom third for each of these.
And it kind of makes me think, why are we not saying much more about this?
It's really important to understand Australia could be doing so much better. But on the brighter note, and I put this up as a kind of contrast to that previous slide. I think you remember the Olympics wasn't all that long ago, and Australia came forth in the gold medal tally, like this is extraordinary.
26 million people, we're just this tiny little country, really. And we came forth in the gold medal tally. And to me what it says is, and I'm going to show you these things all the way along, we can actually do really well as a country when we want to.
And so, my question to you remains, can we address inequities within a generation?
And again, I'm going to keep anchoring us back to the child themselves. So, I really love this poem. It's by Gabriela Mistral and it's a kind of hurry up to us, particularly those of us who are working in early childhood. And she says
"Many things we need can wait, the child cannot. Now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood is being made, his mind is being developed. To him we cannot say tomorrow, his name is today."
So, let's just remember we have a sense of urgency in early childhood.
So again, I want to start with a bright note of what we have done in early childhood. These are two year, childhood immunisation rates and I think you can see across the different groups, indigenous remoteness, socioeconomic status. Pretty good. These data are a bit old now. They're pre COVID data, but nevertheless, it's very unusual for a country to have this sort of leveling out.
So, in other words, in immunisation where we've got really clear data, we've got really clear policy imperative to vaccinate all the children. We've got regulations in place that stop you going to school, for example, if you're not immunised and we've worked out the cold chain and who can actually give immunisations in the middle of the desert if we need to.
So being really clever and really purposeful about making sure there are no inequalities in our immunisation rates.
But I want to talk about inequities. And it's not just about inequalities, its inequities, which are these systematic and potentially remediable differences among population groups. And today we're really going to explore that.
Can we address these inequities, these systematic and potentially remediable differences?
And there's two types of inequities. I'm going to talk to you about outcome inequities. So, these are differences in outcomes that could be preventable. And input inequities, the way we actually deliver services and policies, and whether we take people's needs into account.
So, this is kind of a cool way of thinking about how we deliver things. So, as you can see if everybody gets the same and, you'll be pleased to know or maybe not pleased to know, I am neither a, for those of you who know these colours I'm neither a Geelong, nor I think that's a Footscray jumper. I'm a Richmond supporter and I had nothing to do with these slides, but they are footy slides, which is fantastic. Apologies to my rugby colleagues.
But you can see if everyone gets the same equality of delivery, we get unequal outcomes. But equity means that we give according to need and therefore we get equal outcomes.
And the last slide, sadly, is our reality. And in fact, our AEDC results, which I'll show you in a moment, show that reality, really significant differences across what we call the social gradient.
So, here's the slide I'm talking about. So, the slide, that's on your left is looking at the AEDC. This is developmentally vulnerable on one or more domains since 2009 to 2021.
And the little update in the bottom right hand corner is 2024. Now I'm hoping you can all see that we have done very little to close the equity gap for children. And in 2024 the gap got worse. So rather than closing it, we actually opened it up.
Now it didn't open up a huge amount, but I think you can see that it did open up a fair bit.
And so, what we've got since 2009 is a fundamental inability to close the equity gap for Australia's children. And I think we should say to ourselves.
Why and what can we do?
And that's what I'm going to talk to you about today.
But this equity gap that we see for children in the AEDC by the way, it's not the only equity gap we have.
So, this is what happens after the AEDC, and kids get to school. And I think this is important because it really highlights that these equity gaps start early and then go over time, and in fact they get worse. So, this is looking at NAPLAN data from Year 3 to Year 9 and you can see high average and low SES, and again, that you can see these kind of gaps. This is 2008 and 2022, and pretty much not much change except they got worse. And the fact the gap in 2022 is bigger than the gap in 2008.
And we can look at the key social determinants and inequitable child development and look at, we've been doing this work looking at disadvantage in all its forms. And you can see there, health conditions or sociodemographic or risk factors or geographic environments.
And what we know is if we could make all the children who are disadvantaged advantaged, we would do what you see over on the right, which is we would almost halve all the problems for children.
So, when we are thinking about equity, we have to think about the social determinants.
And this is a very complicated slide, so I apologise for that.
But, just have a look at the directionality of all these little, tiny graphs. This is from the longitudinal study of Australia's children and equity gets under the skin. In other words, things like body mass index and blood pressure, and even things that are really kind of geeky, I guess like telomere lengths, but that's part of our DNA. When that gets shortened, our lives shorten.
So, all the things that we know are important for chronic disease, all start early and the green and the blue line here, you're seeing, is the child and the parent.
And this is again, just showing all those different things in case you didn't catch them on the other slide. And I just want to show you, not for any other reason about inequity getting under the skin, in just showing you how these inequities play out in chronic disease later in life.
So, I'm not just sitting up here going, wouldn't it be nice and great for us all to have equal outcomes?
I'm talking about the sorts of things that are likely to shape the adults of the future of this country.
And I talked to you about the things that we don't do very equitably in terms of delivery. This is Medicare spending. So, you can see the GP ones. It kind of looks equal, doesn't it? Between each group from the lowest income to the highest income. But actually, we know that there are much more sicker kids in the lowest quintile.
We should see even more use there, but we don't. So, it's not equitable, even though it's equal.
But have a look at specialist. Now I'm a specialist. This is me causing this problem. Look how much high the uptake is for specialists like paediatricians in the highest income quintile versus the lowest, almost double.
So, we've got a real problem in this country about how to deliver things equitably.
And then finally, I want to also talk about this group of children, because I think with foundational supports happening, these are the group of children that we really, really trying to lean into, which is these children with additional needs.
And these are from the AEDC results where the teacher has said, Hmm, I'm worried about these problems like speech or behaviour or family problems, or they're blind or deaf or like some sort of problems and I think we need to do something about it.
So that's what we've called emerging needs and what you've seen is that kind of creep up from 2015 to 2018 to 2021.
So, this kind of creeping up, creeping up we've already been seeing for quite some time.
What's really interesting is the types of impairments. So, this yellow line at the top is speech, and then you can see the other things is behaviour, emotional learning.
Let me show you the top four. So, this is speech and language behaviour problems. So, the behaviours the blue, the brown one is home environment. And the green one is emotional problems.
So, of those kids, those 20% of kids where the teacher's going,
'Hey. I'm a bit worried about this kid. I think they might need some extra help.'
41.8% of them are speech and language issues. So, this is kind of the burgeoning issues that are coming our way that the AEDC is showing us.
So, the road to equity needs to be paved with more than good intentions. And so, I want to give you some hints on what we might be able to do.
I want to start with what should we do and what could we do?
And I think what those gold medals showed us is that we can actually do almost anything.
And I want just to have that mindset going forward. But here's some provocations to start with. I talked about the social determinants of health before. These are the sorts of determinants that make a difference to people's lives. These are some adult data from the WHO but just showing you the small percentage that health services contributes to inequities versus things like income, security, living conditions, social capital, employment, working conditions.
So, in other words, if we just look at services, we might be missing a whole lot of what families need. Let's keep that in the back of our mind.
The second is the context of people's lives. Now, if I do this live, it's much more powerful, but you'll get the deal here. This is from an actual paper that says
"They're not mentally ill, their lives are just shit."
In other words, we have to be careful that we don't conflate what's happening for children and just stop at the family and go it must all be about that, and not think about the context of people's lives.
And to do that, we kind of use the ecological framework. Some people call it the onion. This one's particularly focused on child development, but you can see child development in the middle. Then child level determinants, family level determinants, community level determinants, societal, and these are all operating on the child.
So, when we are thinking about the child, if we don't, you know, if we are thinking even about the end of one or we are thinking about populations of children, we always have to think about the context of children's lives and therefore I look at this as the circle of opportunities.
I will say all these slides will be available.
Now the next provocation is there are no silver bullets. Now, I honestly really wish there was a silver bullet that are, you know, one silver bullet, look, just do this one thing, get it right. Inequities will be gone.
But we just know that's not possible. We've tested it, empirically, but to be a hundred percent honest, if you know these families, it is not surprising that there is no silver bullet.
And so rather silver bullets, we've used the other S word, which is to stack. We think there is this opportunity to stack interventions for families.
And if you have a look at all the things here, you can see a lot of these things are things that we do anyway. Parenting programs, maternal child health or child and family health nurses, the neighbourhoods they live in, the housing. These are all, you can see these and you go, oh, we've got policies for that, and policies for that, and policies for that. But none of them are ever stacked like this and applied to single populations.
And that's kind of where we need to go. We need to work out what the right stack is for families going forward.
And with that stack, and I think this is so important now, we can have a much longer conversation about foundational supports, but the opportunity there is to create a really proportionate universal early childhood system.
One that is actually focused on not just seeking problems but also responding. And so, we've been playing with this idea of this universal early childhood development system that spans early childhood education and care, kindy and preschool and school. And then antenatal care, post birth and maternal child health, as if we could just get that right. If we could deliver that equitably, imagine how much better the system would be.
Now just take into account, these are all provocations, but I'm hoping they're helping us all think about what next?
This one I get in trouble for, but I think it's really important. I don't know if it's just because I've gotten old and grumpy but, this is a pressure cooker and as you know, a pressure cooker does slow food fast, and we would suggest that maybe we need to do slow system change fast.
At the moment we go really slowly. We talk about going at the speed of trust and I completely agree with that. But the question I have is, can we speed up the speed of trust or do we want to just keep watching those AEDC results?
I'll come back here in three years time and we'll watch those inequities and go, well, that was kind of nice. And, you know, New South Wales is a pretty innovative state. I'd bet there's a few areas out there that will be going, nah, we're not going to keep doing this. We're not just going to keep watching these inequities.
The other thing that we've got in our provocations are that, not all poor children live in poor areas, so there's a lot of interest in place-based work, and I think that's fantastic. But when we actually have a look, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but just take my word, I will send these slides to you all, about 30% of children who live in disadvantaged households do not live in the poorest areas of Australia.
So, if all we ever do is targeted approaches, targeting place-based areas, and we don't do universal, then we're going to miss about 30% of kids and 30% of kids is a lot of kids.
So again, that dual thinking about what are we going to do across the whole state, area, country, and what are we going to do that's targeted in place?
And then we talked about this, the projective benefits of actually addressing disadvantage and not forgetting that if we do something we can actually make a difference. And I want to keep harping on that. If we do something, we can actually make a difference.
And then the final thing is, and this will be fairly topical at the moment, without an actual answer, which is, I don't think we can underestimate the social shock of the coronavirus.
And we do need to think about what children were exposed to over that time and what that might mean for their development going forward. But to be honest, right now, we just don't know. But I think we have to keep it in there.
So back to, what should we do?
What could we do?
Well, first of all, can I say these are Federal slides and I haven't done anything New South Wales specific, but it's a really interesting, interesting time where you've got all these policies that are being developed separately, at least at a Federal level, and I would bet London to a brick you've got the same sort of thing in New South Wales all being applied to the same families with young children, but all being applied separately.
But what a moment in time to try and make a difference.
And I really kind of like using this. This is how to create sustainable policy long enough to affect change. And I'm going to do this pretty quickly because we haven't got a lot of time, so I'm going to click through everything.
So Kingdon who's this kind of cool guy in the US who talks about public policy, talks about three things needed to keep the policy window open.
Number one, recognition of the problem and therefore data.
And isn't that helpful?
That, you know, this whole symposium is about data.
Number two, identification of the solution through policy. For which you need evidence for, which I'm going to show you quite a bit.
And number three, political imperative. And that's the extraordinary thing at the moment. We have a political imperative. In fact, our Prime Minister basically said, no child will be left behind.
So, the question to all of us, what do we need to do to keep that policy window open for as long as possible for children?
So, the other sort of, I know I haven't got to the solutions yet, but I just want to lay out some of these ideas.
And the other idea I have is this idea of radical pragmatism. So, as I've said to you, here are the kind of provocations of all the things we could be thinking about.
Here's the kind of provocation to say, what can we do tomorrow?
And here's an approach that I'm really excited about, called radical pragmatism and at some stage I thought I'd made it up, but it's not true. I did not make it up. It's come out beforehand and you can see the journal that it was in, but it's actually what happens during a crisis.
So, during COVID we did radical pragmatism. We don't know what to do. We better experiment. I would suggest that we are currently in another crisis for early childhood development, and I think the AEDC results in my view are a crisis. And it's a real call to action.
But the beauty about empirical, radical pragmatism is it asks you to say, do what you need to do. Take an empirical and experimental mindset and commit yourself to measuring results.
In other words, don't pretend you know everything. Be prepared to experiment but be prepared to actually measure the results. And our argument is this is exactly the sort of model we should be applying now.
So back to what should we do and what can we do?
So, I think this is really important because I think what we did during COVID, you know, we gave money to people who weren't poor. We housed people, we did all sorts of things.
We got the immunisation out in 12 months. And you can see we came fourth in the gold medals. I think Australia is not a country about what we can and can't do. Because I think we can do anything, but it might be a country about what we will and won't do. And so, people like you who are in the audience are really deciding what we will and won't do.
But, to keep you occupied here's five ideas that I'm going to put forward.
And I'm going to put forward in the context of this is a quote from Menkin who was on the Supreme Court in America when you actually wanted to have judgments by the Supreme Court. Anyway, he says,
"For every complex problem there is a simple solution, and it is wrong."
So, I'm going to ask us to kind of lean into that complexity.
So, during COVID, we did a fair bit of work here at Centre for Community Child Health, trying to look at how we'd reimagine the future for a more equitable Australia drawing on the research of what we'd found had happened during COVID. And we came up with these five areas, which is about addressing financial instability, the role of ECC in schools, rethinking service delivery, prevention and early intervention for mental health, and using digital solutions. And importantly, underpinned by data and indicators.
So, this has kind of been a useful framework for sort of thinking about the things that we do, and we can think about them nationally, what we might do across the whole country, and we can think about them in place, what we might do in a single place that starts to look at this as a stack.
These are all some of the projects. I'm not going to go through each of these projects. You'll be pleased to know you're not stuck here for the next hour while I yada on about every project, but I'm going to show you some exemplars because I'm hoping that will stimulate some of your thinking about some of the things you might be able to do.
So, the first one is addressing financial instability.
And you know, sometimes this is difficult to talk about, isn't it?
Governments don't love giving out money, but we've been particularly interested in this program called Healthier Wealthier Families, which is actually a trial. We're trialling it more formally now in Queensland, but it was a pilot in Victoria where we put something like $6,000 more into people's homes per year and it was very simple.
Take the child and family health nurse, get them to ask about financial difficulties. Do an active and warm referral to a financial wellbeing provider and then look at how to maximise income through better budgeting. Things you're entitled to that you didn't get.
So, it's not really, it's really doesn't have that moral outrage
'Oh we're giving people money.'
It doesn't look at the deserving versus undeserved. It's really about strengthening the family's own ability to get the money actually; they were meant to get anyway.
So, trial going on in Queensland, watch this space, but it is based on a program in Scotland that we've borrowed actually from them and now we're working with them on this idea of how do you give families money they're actually entitled to, because we know money makes a difference.
I will tell you though, from our own work, money alone does not close the gap.
The second is the role of early childhood education and care in schools. Now, I know a lot of your presentations today are on early childhood education and care, so I'm actually not going to spend a lot of time on this one in terms of ECEC, but I want to talk to you about schools because really that, well in your case, the K to 3 space, those first three to four years of school are absolutely fundamental for putting children on the sort of developmental trajectory for success. And if kids are not succeeding by the time they get to Grade 3, that is their engaged and learning, pretty much the rest of their whole education career is going to be like that. And they're already disengaging by the time they're in grade 3.
But, you know, there are moments in life where you have these kind of pivotal kind of ideas or even revelations. And this was this revelation I had when I was working in the Education Department in Victoria. I thought, oh my goodness, this little blue dot, that is what I do in healthcare. That's what the healthcare system does for children.
And this giant blue dot is the education system. So, any rational person would say, where are you going to spend most of your time?
Are you going to spend most of your time in the little blue dot, or most of your time in the big blue dot, where children go to school five days a week, seven hours a day, 40 weeks a year, 13 years, more or less of their life.
So, then it was like, clearly, we should be thinking about where the greatest exposure is.
And so, I've been having just really a rollicking good time with this but really trying to take it very seriously about this idea of reinventing Australian schools. And we've written a white paper on it. And for those who can, you can scan there, or you can just go onto the website.
I've been doing it with Pasi Sahlberg who's a fantastic Finnish educator who actually used to head up research at the Gonski Institute, is now at the University of Melbourne. But he invited me to this great session. I don't know, if you guys will know this where the Utzon room is because you are New South Welshman. But of course, this is the Opera House.
So, it's probably one of my leading moments in life, which was, to actually be on this panel at the Opera House. You can see the title was
'Imagine if health was a 21st Century skill taught in every school.'
We can have a much longer conversation about that.
The cool thing about this was it was the Opera House's birthday; you might recall that. And so, we got up and we all sang the Opera House happy birthday. So officially now I have actually sung at the Opera House. And if you knew how badly I sing you'd think that was even funnier.
So, let's move on to rethinking service delivery, and I want to share with you the National Child and Family Hubs Network because this is really exciting.
I'm going to share with you a video in a moment, and you'll get a sense of what it's like.
But the National Child and Family Hubs Network has grown out of our hubs work, which basically says, how do you bring a whole lot of different front doors together, health, education, or not-for-profits?
We are working with Tresillian, we are working with community health. We're working with schools and saying, how do you bring these hubs together, the co-location, and then integration of different services that might need the needs of families. And the beauty about the network is everyone's coming together to go hey,
'How do we make these things really work?'
So let me share this video with you and hope for the best.
Casey Bishop
My role as a manager is about ensuring that families are able to access all the supports and services that they need in the one place here at our hubs. I think the most important thing for our service is service integration, and that's not just about integrating within our service, it's also about building those partnerships to really make the space work for the community.
We offer playgroups parenting programs and family support services. Another service that we offer at one of our Centres is the kindergarten. We can cater for up to 44 children.
Mother
I'm a mother of six children with special needs.
We come here on a regular basis for help with speech pathology, OT, behavioural problems, eating problems.
The Benevolent Society has been able to help us.
Casey Bishop
I think hubs are important because it provides families, especially new and young families, with a space to create those social networks with other parents and a space to be able to get the advice or information, I guess, about parenting that they might otherwise be scrambling for.
Mother
It's a great place to come for anyone, whether you have special needs, no needs, just want to socialise, would like some information on your child or yourself.
It doesn't matter what sort of help you need; they will provide you with the help that you're looking for.
Sharon Goldfield
So, as I mentioned to you before, there are these different doors. Now I'm not going to go through the evidence here because I know when I share the slides it'll all be there for you. But I just want to show that the social return of $3.50 for every dollar that's being invested in hubs is some work that we've done.
So, they're not only effective, but also a cost effective way. And they kind of make sense, right?
How do we bring services together to better meet the needs locally?
It just makes sense. But this is about rethinking service delivery.
Right, onto prevention and early intervention for mental health. And I want to talk here about Right at Home.
So Right at Home is a randomised control trial of sustained nurse home visiting, but it's now, and it's built on mesh, which of course Lynn Kemp led and is in New South Wales.
And what's really exciting about this is there's so few things that we can show actual impact at a public health level. But what Right at Home showed us is that when nurses are well trained, they go into people's homes, particularly families who are living in adversity, they can actually make a difference, not only at two years, where we saw differences in parent care, responsive parenting in the home learning environment, but we saw differences at three to five years of age and maternal mental health. And then at six years of age, we started to see changes in the child themselves.
Like this is mind blowing to me that we actually saw differences at all. We did it in nine areas using real nurses. And yet there was a difference between the control and intervention group. And so, from a mental health point of view, even though this is not a mental health intervention, we really improved the mental health of mums, and you can understand why, because we made parenting a better prospect for them.
So, let's move on to our next one, which is using digital solutions.
So, this is just the tip of the iceberg in using digital solutions, but I wanted to do this one. We've got a few things here. We do the Raising Children Network. We talked about that, but I particularly wanted to use it from an equity lens point of view about a program we've been doing in Western Victoria called By Five.
What's fascinating about this is it's using digital solutions. It's using Royal Far West, which many of you will know to provide support to families, through the school. And it's kind of got three tiers, community health literacy, case-based collaboration, and collaborative consultations.
So instead of waiting for those families to drive down the road to go and see a paediatrician, or to even get referred to a GP, they get to see a paediatrician when they're sitting with their maternal child health nurse, so locally they've got all their local services, they see the paediatrician, the wait list goes right down. And in schools, we've been doing that with Royal Far West.
So again, it's how do we repurpose our healthcare system to deliver it equitably, and in this case, take into account digital solutions. There are a lot more in the digital solution space I could talk about, and I hope you are thinking about that too, because Australia is the wide brown land and I can tell you there is no way we'll ever have services everywhere. And you all know about the challenges of where do we put early childhood education and care, sadly cannot be delivered by telehealth, but I reckon there's probably some interesting solutions in there nevertheless.
And then finally the whole thing has to be underpinned by data and indicators. What we know is there is a real lack of using data properly to drive system change.
This is a quote from James Baldwin. He was actually a very famous poet, but I really like it because he talks about
'Not everything that his faced can be changed'
so maybe we'll get data, and we can't change it, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
And so, we do need to think very clearly about the data.
Now with the Australian Early Development Census, that gives us fabulous population data at a small area level, really, sometimes suburb. Fantastic, but it doesn't tell us what we're going to do tomorrow.
And that really challenged a number of us, and we started thinking about, you know, how do we get the right data into the hands of the right people?
So, what we know is, there's a whole lot of services out there and then there's a whole lot of programs out there that get off those services. So, if you like, here's a Christmas tree with all the different Sunshine and Rainbows program and all the different programs.
But what we know is underneath the Christmas tree, the service system we already deliver is languishing. We know very little about it. We don't know if it's developing properly.
So, this is restacking the odds. You'll see the stack thing goes through everything and we said, what about if we could just get five things right?
And here are the five things. Antenatal care, early childhood education and care, early years of school and sustained nurse home visiting and parenting programs where there's evidence for target programming.
What if we could just get those five things right in terms of quality.
Is it any good?
Quantity?
Is there enough and participation rates, do people actually come?
And so, we've developed a set of lead indicators, and this is the reason why. What we know is often we've got data, and they've got the great population data, which is kind of what the AEDC is really.
Then we go, I know what we should do. Let's implement a few activities. We hope for some change, and then we just measure the AEDC again and go, why didn't things change?
When really that bit in the middle, that bit we should be really explicit about is missing. And that is where lead indicators come in.
This is from another report, which is just this fantastic report actually on something completely not to do with early childhood, but I just want to reorientate and reinforce us, reinforce this idea of lag indicators and the fact that there's so much noise in lag indicators, and how do you get the lead data in context, interpret it right, and then collect those insights and do something about it.
So that is exactly what we've done with restacking the odds. So here is my little bit on early childhood. This is the wonderful work that Karen Thorpe led on looking at the different levels of quality across the country.
So, there is no way we can confer equitable outcomes for children with this variability in quality. And so, we designed restacking the odds to be able to be used by services exactly like those early childhood educational and care services.
So, two major bits of it. Get the data often out the back end of the actual service. Create data visualisations that are co-designed with the actual frontline practitioners, and then benchmark it against a set of lead indicators, and then work with services on how do you plan, do study x, to actually take what you've learned from the data and start problem solving like in one area where they said, why aren't kids getting 30 hours?
They're not coming for 30 hours. And we know that now at least, because we gave them the numerator, the denominator, and who wasn't coming. Well, it turned out the local bus came through and picked up all those kids an hour earlier, so they lost an hour every day. Just changing the bus route or getting those kids picked up an hour earlier changed everything.
Without those data, there's no way they would've looked at that.
And so, when you've got these things of constant quantity, quality, and participation, what you want to know is can you deliver it consistently?
And so, these are the sort of data that you get. You get data at the community level, data at the service provider level, and data you can provide with philanthropy. And you can see the little run lines because you are often looking at data every couple of weeks.
So, this is about getting data into the hands of frontline providers because we're increasingly the view that the system will not change unless we get data into the hands of frontline providers and give them the skills to not only use the data but actually use the data to do something different.
And it's a lovely frontal down from the AEDC Here's my AEDC population outcome. Hmm.
What's my theory of change?
Are these services actually going to lead to better AEDC outcomes?
How are these services actually doing?
Well, it turns out not very well. It turns out we've got plenty of this, but it's pretty crap or great this no one comes. And then you can start problem solving. But without the data, you can't get to that level of granularity. And for us, it's kind of like going to a footy game and not getting the score till the end and then wondering why you couldn't do anything along the game, nobody would do that. And yes, and yet that is what we actually expect from our service providers. So, I'm going to finish. Way up with the James Webb telescope.
So, this is a picture from the James Webb Telescope. Giant piece of infrastructure hurtling its way through space sending back these enormous, just extraordinary stories of how it was built.
If you ever want to watch documentaries on it, just extraordinary has something like 120 potential failure points. None of them failed, just amazing. A lot of money spent to be able to provide data for researchers and people on the ground really for eternity.
So, then we start saying, imagine a world where children are thriving and where we can actually deliver on prevention, early intervention, and tailor care.
And for us, this is about Gen V.
So, while this is in Victoria, forget that it's really a national asset because we've got 50,000 families from metro, rural, regional areas, 50,000 families who speak 72 languages. 50,000 families for whom more than 800 are actually First Nations, 50,000 families who actually across the entire social gradient properly, you know how normally like everyone kind of in the middle, and we sell to society, we've got saliva samples and blood samples, et cetera.
So, I want to say to you that if we want to know the answers to some of these questions about, even about the AEDC, what are the sorts of things we could do that we could test in a cohort like that and translate anywhere in the country?
Because Victoria, it turns out, is not all that different to New South Wales or Queensland. The only way we're really different is we are not like remote Australia.
So, here are my final kind of provocations. First of all, which of you is going to be the fish?
Who's going to be brave enough to try and do things differently?
I have to say Victoria, I mean, sorry, Australia, New South Wales, we really like doing things in incremental ways and I think with the sort of political will we have at the moment and the policy opportunities, I think we should be bold.
I think we should say to ourself, imagine if in three years time when we did the AEDC we'd be able to show some change in those inequities.
And so, here's my challenge to you as leaders, and I'm going to read it out. It's from Don Berwick. So, he was the guru of quality improvement in hospitals and why?
Because in hospitals this all took off because we were busy killing people. Turns out it's not a good thing to do. People don't like that. But I'm putting this out to you.
"It is the burden on good leadership to make the currently unthinkable thinkable, to question the obvious, to make the present systems unavailable as options for the future.
The boundaries in our minds create fear about the consequences of crossing over to the undiscovered country. But the possibilities we really need do not lie on this side of our mental fences.
And once crossed, these fences will look as foolish in retrospect as the belief of other times now often look to us."
And on that note, I thank you very much. I'm sure it's going to be or has been an amazing day, and I look forward to hearing about it.
And of course, any feedback, any questions, please send them through.
Thank you so much.
[End of transcript]


Toni Kember
- AEDC NSW National Committee Member
- Director – Early Learners Unit, Public Early Childhood Education and Care (PECEC), Early Childhood Outcomes
NSW Department of Education


Shellee Whiffin
Early Years Coordinator – Early Learners Unit, Public Early Childhood Education (PECE), Early Childhood Outcomes
NSW Department of Education


Mary Taiwo
AEDC NSW State Coordinator and Senior Population and Data Officer – Early Childhood Outcomes
NSW Department of Education
Enquiries: aedc@det.nsw.edu.au