Around half of Australia's Indigenous children are not enrolled in preschool education. This briefing paper recommends that two years of free, high quality and culturally appropriate preschool education should be made a priority for all Indigenous children.

Children learn and develop through a combination of experiences, within and outside the family home. This Policy Brief explores the distinction that is often made about the role of care and education in children’s services and highlights the importance of the interwoven nature of care and education. For the purpose of this Policy Brief, ‘children’s...

The quality of children’s services has a profound influence on children’s development throughout the life course. This policy brief will highlight the powerful influence that the interaction between regulation, accreditation and curricula has on the quality of children’s services.

This plan aims to improve the quality, affordability and fairness of Australia’s child care and preschools system. ACOSS proposes expanding Child Care Benefit, linking its value to the cost of good quality services, axing the Child Care Rebate and creating a national system which gives parents more information about the quality of services, keeps prices...

A number of organisations currently collect information on children's services. While there is some duplication of information across the collections, there are also notable gaps, and no single collection or combination of collections, is able to provide an accurate measure of the number and proportion of children who attend child care and/or preschool. This bulletin...