Toward a Comprehensive Early Childhood Development System: Evidence-Based Strategies for Implementation

Abstract

Australia faces continuing deep socioeconomic inequality and deep disadvantage evident in the early years of life and casting a shadow over long-term health, wellbeing, and prosperity. The past decades have given rise to a body of evidence that demonstrates the benefit and cost effectiveness for promoting health and wellbeing to address these inequities and to improve outcomes over the life course. Promotion of early childhood development (ECD) requires a broad policy architecture to maximise the investment in several domains: early learning and care, child and maternal health services, child development services, child safety services, child-focused community services, and family-focused government expenditure and fiscal policy. Core challenges to this agenda are (a) the disjointed and siloed nature of service planning and delivery amongst the various line agencies and non-governmental organisations, and (b) provision of services that fail to reach their target clients due to perceived barriers to access. This report provides a framework for the establishment, maintenance, evaluation and scaling up of a whole-of-government system to optimise early childhood development. The framework presented here outlines global evidence from research on large-scale government efforts to develop cross-sectoral national initiatives to improve child health and wellbeing. This framework builds on five phases: establishment of visionary leadership, exploration, preparation, implementation, and continuation.

Keywords: Early years, implementation science, socioeconomic inequality, multi-sectoral intervention, policy framework