Investigators
Ellen Harvey, Yasmin Harman-Smith, Rosemary Cahill
Project description
Project status: Completed in 2020
The impact of children’s experiences through their first 2,000 days of life – from conception to the start of full-time schooling – are widely acknowledged. Reflecting the importance of this period on life-long health, development and learning, numerous forms of early childhood support and services are provided across Australia for young children and their families via the health, education and community sectors.
It aims to foreground current strengths and gaps across Australia and within each state and territory, and to offer a platform upon which to build a more cohesive early childhood system for all Australian children from conception to classroom.
Many communities have multiple early childhood services, each providing different programs, pursuing different objectives and drawing on expertise from different disciplines. Ideally, these multiple services serve complementary functions for children and families within their community but in some places, the services duplicate (or even compete with) each other and in other places, there are significant service gaps or unmet demand.
CoLab is preparing a policy report to provide an overview of early years services and community programs in Australia and for each state and territory.
For further information about the project and its findings, contact Yasmin Harman-Smith.
External collaborators
David Ansell (Minderoo Foundation), Sally Brinkman (University of South Australia)
Funders
Department for Education, South Australia