In this session, Mark will highlight what the AEDC data means for the NSW Department of Education and how the evidence will help the department support outcomes for children and families across NSW through the implementation of Our Plan for NSW Public Education.

In this session, Tristan will highlight some of the key outcomes of the AEDC 2024 national outcomes and their immediate implications.

Tristan Reed

A/g Deputy Secretary of Early Childhood and Youth – Australian Government Department of Education.

The AEDC data is a valuable data set, notwithstanding aspects of the data collection and release, that need further improvement. The AEDC still has unmet potential as it gives a good indication of early childhood development across Australia. If development in the early years is actualised as expected, then all other lifelong goals have the potential to be fully attained.

This session will highlight the need to develop a long-sighted view and cross government collaboration to ensure improvement in early childhood outcomes in the coming years. This session will also share some of the findings from an AEDC First Nations project where there was a varied level of awareness and understanding of the AEDC across different stakeholders’ group.

This presentation will provide an overview of the 2024 AEDC results in NSW as well as state-level trends in child development over the past 15 years (2009 to 2024).

We will explore trends over time in the percentage of children who are vulnerable, at risk and on track in each of the 5 developmental domains of the AEDC, as well as trends in the AEDC summary indicators. AEDC results will be compared for key equity groups, such as students living in more and less socio-economically disadvantaged communities in the state, as well as children growing up in metropolitan, regional and remote areas. We will explore the demographic characteristics and ECEC experiences of the children in the 2024 AEDC cohort in NSW, and contrast this with earlier cohorts of children (2009 to 2021) to help explain the trends over time in child development outcomes.

We will consider what these trends tell us about how children are faring and what supports they may need as they transition to school.

This workshop focuses on the utility of the Australian Early Development Census data for understanding indicators of key skills, whilst also creating feed-forward opportunities for teachers to support children to reach their potential.

In the past decade, there has been a great global effort to support children’s health, development, and well-being. Evidence shows that strategic investments in early childhood are imperative for averting the onset of health challenges and mitigating their societal impacts. Despite the evidence and investments, inequities persist in early childhood outcomes due to preventable social, economic, or geographic factors.

This session will explore these systemic inequities and their impact on budgets, the productivity of society at large, and in delivering on greater human capital.

Australian children have had a disadvantaged trajectory in early childhood outcomes. Nevertheless, with the proper political will and resource commitments, Australia could close the child equity gap within a generation.

This presentation will describe findings from the NSW Child Development Study, a research project that has followed the development of a population cohort of 96,000 children up to the age of 19 years. These were children for whom teachers completed the Australian Early Development Census (AEDC) in 2009 during their first year of full-time school, and who self-reported on their mental health and wellbeing during their final year of primary school (Year 6) in 2015 via the Middle Childhood Survey (MCS).

This presentation will describe the identification of three different ‘risk profiles’ of developmental vulnerability at age 5 using AEDC data which increase the risk for later childhood mental health disorders (between ages 6–12 years) relative to children without these risk profiles.

The presentation will also describe social-emotional skills that contribute to students’ progress in reading and numeracy attainment between Kindergarten to Year 7, demonstrating the role of students’ self-awareness and self-management at age 11 years (using MCS data) in supporting achievement. Findings emphasise the important dual role of educators in supporting students’ mental health alongside their academic attainment.