Agreed government reforms will require early childhood education and care providers to employ a substantially larger and more highly qualified workforce, according to a report released by the Productivity Commission. The report - Early Childhood Development Workforce - finds that many more workers will be required in preschool and long day care. Full implementation of...

Families are often faced with a range of different, complex health and psychosocial problems. Place-based approaches aim to address these complex problems by focusing on the social and physical environment of a community and on better integrated and more accessible service systems, rather than focusing principally on the problems faced by individuals. A place-based approach...

Media use is often implicated in debates about how young people should use their time for optimal benefit. In the child development literature and in more popular discourses, media use, and particularly television viewing, has long been associated with a number of serious social problems, including the inability to read well and/or concentrate on learning...

The Children’s Ground project aims to develop a place-based approach to support children and their families in highly disadvantaged communities. The project approach is informed by research and evidence, recognising the multiple and multi-level influences on children’s development and the need to support the role of communities in improving outcomes for children.

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...