Building the best communities for early child development

Every child deserves the best possible start in life. But what is essential for this? and who needs help the most? - these are the big questions.

The Telethon Kids Institute has invested more than a decade in finding the answers, with its work leading to the roll-out across Australia of the world’s first ongoing “proven and reliable measure” of early childhood development.

Known as the Australian Early Development Census (AEDC), the data uncovered and analysed from this not only underpins most major early years initiatives launched in Australia, it continues to steer policy direction in education and health, future research and the decisions of local governments, schools and community groups.

Australia now relies on it to expose and map unmet needs, work out how to respond, guide resource allocation and reveal what makes a difference and what has failed to do so.

Early work by Institute researchers, piloting a Canadian-developed Early Development Index (EDI) in Perth more than 10 years ago, attracted the attention of the nation and progressed to the development and introduction of the population-wide AEDC.

With the Australian Government providing $21.9 million for implementation, its roll-out across the country in 2009 was fuelled by the understanding that the growth of young brains is shaped not only by genes and nutrition, but also experiences and opportunities provided in early childhood.

Keeping track of how every child has developed by the time they start their first year of full-time school, the AEDC measures five key areas: physical health and wellbeing; social competence; emotional maturity; language and cognitive skills; communication skills and general knowledge.

Through this, the AEDC has shone the light on how vitally important the early years are. It revealed that children who are developmentally vulnerable on the language and cognitive domain, or on the communication and general knowledge domain, have lower NAPLAN numeracy and reading test scores in Year 3 and do not catch up.

Also, it highlighted that where children live can impact on their development. Of children living in major cities, 21 per cent were developmentally vulnerable on one or more domains, compared to 47 per cent of children in very remote areas.

And the AEDC - conducted every three years - continues to keep watch. The third collection of AEDC data, undertaken just last year, has enabled communities, governments, early childhood professionals and researchers to compare AEDC data across time and, for the first time, to start tracking emerging trends.

The 2015 results show that around one in five children were developmentally vulnerable on one or more domains, which is in line with results from 2012, and an improvement on 2009. However, differences in developmental vulnerability across the domains and among children from different demographic profiles, suggests there is more work to be done.

Telethon Kids Institute lead researcher Dr Sally Brinkman said it was exciting to see the results from the third round.

“The AEDC is a proven and reliable measure of children’s development and the results help communities understand what’s working well and what needs to be improved so that everyone in the community can better support the development of young kids before they start school,” Dr Brinkman said.

“It has been very rewarding to see how our early work in piloting the EDI in Perth more than 10 years ago has progressed to a national measure of child development.”

“In our pilot study back in 2003, we surveyed the teachers of more than 4300 pre-primary students,” Dr Brinkman said. “In 2015, the AEDC collected information on more than 300,000 children.”

Population data like the AEDC, provides the evidence required to support resource allocation decisions.

It is a measure – across five domains - of the things that children need to be able to do well by the time they enter school,” said Institute researcher Dr Yasmin Harman-Smith.

“They are not aspirations - measures of what we would love children to be able to do. These are the basic things. If these things are lacking, then children are going to struggle.

“And they are indicators of what has gone well, or not so well, in children’s lives before they start school.”

The Institute continues to play a central role in supporting AEDC stakeholders to use the data. It has developed resources in easy-to-understand formats, including infographics, case studies and videos. Also it supports states and territories, early childhood educators, researchers and community groups to think about the data and to integrate it into their planning and monitoring processes.

The focus now is on aiding big policy decisions.

“We are helping stakeholders understand population data, and understand how they can use it for informing policy and practice,” said Dr Harman-Smith. “We supply strategic advice and support and training.

“And we have taken the approach of broadening people’s horizons about how the data can be used.

“While communities around Australia have taken up the AEDC, there is a focus now on supporting its use with stakeholders in government, local councils and schools.”

And the AEDC continues to teach Australia important lessons, including the need for a balanced approach between the provision of universal programs and targeted supports.

“There is a strong relationship between socioeconomic disadvantage and developmental vulnerability,” said Dr Harman-Smith. “In communities with fewer socio-economic resources, larger proportions of children show developmental vulnerabilities.

“What generally happens is people like to target services then to those communities. But many more children live in the centre of the socio economic spectrum.

“So when you look at the number of children who are vulnerable in communities, rather than the per cent alone, you can see that there are many more vulnerable children in suburbs that would not normally be targeted with services and support.

“In order to ensure that all children and families receive the level of support they need, we need a strong universal service base with targeted supports for families facing additional challenges.”

Other valuable insights have been revealed in gender and jurisdictional differences, the impact of the neighbourhood built environment, impact of low birth weight and smoking, academic outcome predictors, mental health and bilingual student issues and teacher and parent views.

The AEDC programme involves a partnership with the Australian Government, State and Territory Governments, the Social Research Centre, the Centre for Community Child Health, the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne and the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute.