Abstract
Early childhood experiences and environments impact children’s health, development and wellbeing throughout their lifetime. Children may experience disadvantage depending on the conditions in which they live, learn and grow. This can lead to immediate and long-term impacts at both the individual and societal levels. The COVID-19 pandemic likely has increased existing disadvantage for these children, contributing to worsened outcomes and increased inequity. Robust measurement of disadvantage during early childhood is essential to identifying effective strategies to address these inequities to optimise children’s health, development, and wellbeing. The Multi-Agency Data Integration Project (MADIP) First Five Years (FFY) project is an Australian Government administrative dataset that includes the Australian Early Development Census (AEDC). The AEDC is a valuable tool for monitoring childhood developmental inequities, it assesses aspects of children’s development across five key domains at the time of commencement of the first year of school. Together, this data can help to understand the impacts of multidimensional early childhood factors on children’s health, development and wellbeing, and to identify children at higher risk of developmental vulnerability. In our Phase One work, we used the MADIP-FFY-AEDC data, in collaboration with the Australian Government Department of Education, to conduct a rapid desktop review and data evaluation that demonstrated a range of factors that drove inequitable developmental outcomes in children. Our current Phase Two work expands on this work to further understand associations between key child disadvantage and priority population indicators and childhood developmental vulnerability. The key child disadvantage indicators in this project are guided by the Changing Children’s Chances (CCC) social determinants framework. Phase Two findings will provide further valuable insights into the subset of disadvantage and priority population indicators that best predict children’s developmental vulnerability that could be leveraged for policy purposes.
