This policy brief outlines the complexities involved in selecting interventions for early childhood services. It advocates for a broader method of assessing outcomes of interventions through incorporating practice-based evidence into our understanding of evidence-based practice.

For services in the early childhood sector, choosing the most effective interventions for children and their families often involves a challenging examination and evaluation of the available evidence. Traditionally, researchers have looked to evidence stemming from trials that incorporate rigorous methodologies as a way of selecting the ‘best’ evidence for evaluation. However, this narrow approach is not the only way of identifying effective interventions, nor is it necessarily always the best way.