The First Five Years was developed as a flagship project under the Data Integration Partnership for Australia (DIPA) as a collaborative endeavour involving project partners from across government and the university sector.
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For the first time, administrative data on child care participation and quality was linked to a measure of childhood development, along with a broad range of family, social, economic and health data.
The project demonstrated the significant value of integrated data to contribute to the policy evidence base, focussing on two broad questions:
- What child and family characteristics contribute to children being developmentally vulnerable at age 4-6 years?
- How does child care attendance affect child developmental vulnerability, and do these effects differ based on child care usage patterns and quality of services?
Introduction
The project used descriptive analysis, predictive modelling, and statistical inference techniques to explore associations between children’s circumstances and child care use and their developmental outcomes in the first year of school.
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Child and family characteristics
In this section we show how socio-economic factors such as parental educational attainment, household income and neighbourhood SES were associated with child development vulnerability. Other family composition factors such as single/dual parent household, language background and maternal age of the mother at birth are also investigated. How child and parent ill-health affected child development is presented separately for boys and girls. The impact of parental ill-health in the first five years before the child went to school is also shown.
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Predictive modelling of developmental vulnerability in children
In this section, the risk and preventative factors that had a significant association with early child development are identified. How much each individual factor was associated with child developmental vulnerability are reported, for boys and girls separately.
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Associations between early education attendance and child development
In this section, we describe the association between formal child care and preschool attendance and child development for the whole AEDC cohort and for different subgroups of the population (Indigenous, language background other than English, single parent, and low Socio-economic status). The relationship between parental and child-centric factors and the rates of formal child care attendance is also presented.
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Quality of child care
In this section we describe the associations between child care quality and rates of being developmentally on track for different subgroups of the population.
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Duration of child care attendance
In this section we describe the associations between child care duration and rates of being developmentally on track for different subgroups of the population.
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Estimating the effect of child care on children’s developmental outcomes
In this section we estimate the effect of child care attendance and duration, and quality on developmental vulnerability using statistical inference techniques such as G-computation and Inverse Propensity Weighting to control for the differences in children’s circumstances.
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Conclusions
In this section, we summarise the key results of the project, discuss the limitations and future directions.
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Methodology
This section contains detailed information about datasets, key analytical decisions, constructed factors and statistical techniques used within the project.
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Appendix
This section discusses charged and attended child care hours, linkage bias, sample size for the inference computation results, and the rules used for calculating income.