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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-09-23 Daily Xml
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EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT

The Hon. L. STEVENS (Little Para) (15:28): Today I would like to talk about early childhood development and, in particular, the Australian Early Development Index. Since the beginning of the Rann Labor government from 2002 onwards, a number of reports from various parts of government have indicated the importance of early childhood development. The former Thinker in Residence, Dr Fraser Mustard from Canada, also focused our attention on the importance of intervening earlier, the importance of understanding brain development and the importance of making progress at a population level. Recent COAG initiatives have meant that the federal government, at last, also has become involved in looking at this in a constructive policy sense, and is bringing in a number of initiatives to start a much more integrated and cohesive process across the whole country.

In particular, the Australian Early Development Index has been developed as a way of measuring children's development in five domains. This development index measures physical health and wellbeing, social competence, emotional maturity, language and cognitive skills, and communication and general knowledge. From 1 May to 31 July, across Australia, these checklists were completed for 261,000 children in the first year of full-time school. It covered 95 per cent of schools across Australia.

In South Australia, over the same time, these checklists were completed for 16,200 children in their first year of full-time school, which was 94 per cent of schools. So, for the first time, we have collected data on students across 94 per cent of schools. This data will be released later in the year, which will mean that in December national data will be available on the AEDI website; and it will be available for us to see just how our five year olds, right across Australia, in particular geographical locations, have measured up in terms of the criteria.

So, what is the point of this? The point is that, if we continue to do measurements of the AEDIs every year, we will be able to track these criteria applying to five year olds as they enter the school system and we will be able to see that if we make particular interventions early in a child's life we should be able to see positive changes to the AEDI results.

In the northern suburbs of Adelaide I have established a Northern Early Childhood Development Steering Committee. That steering committee has been meeting since the beginning of the year and is composed of: the regional directors of the state government departments of education and family and community services; the commonwealth managers of DEEWR and FaHCSIA; senior managers of Playford and Salisbury councils; the chief executive officers of the Children, Youth and Women's Health Service and the Central Northern Adelaide Health Service; the Chief Executive of Anglicare (in this case, Dr Lynn Arnold); the assistant director of Catholic Family Services (another very significant non-government organisation working in the northern area); and myself as chair.

This group will use the data to identify particular communities across Salisbury and Playford local council areas and determine how they might put their resources together to address early childhood services in particular communities.

The continuing collection of AEDI data over the years will measure the success of those strategies. This is an excellent innovation in the north, and we hope we will be able to make some progress towards positively changing outcomes for our youngest citizens.

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