22 January 2015 | General Interest
The Australian Futures Project has published two papers as part of System Shift: Learning within the Early Childhood development System to Move to Greater Impact, an initiative aimed at bettering the early childhood development system as a whole.
In 2012 the proportion of Australian children identified as developmentally vulnerable at age 5 was 22 per cent. The goal of the System Shift initiative is to reduce this figure to 15 per cent by 2020.
The first of the published papers, Early Childhood Development: Perspectives of the System, reports on interviews with 35 decision-makers from across the early childhood development system – from Ministers and Secretaries to experts from academia, non-government, media, and the private sector – in order to draw on their knowledge, experience, and capacity, to identify problems and build solutions that have proved elusive.
The second paper, Australia’s Early Childhood Development System: What We Know, provides a review of existing literature from within the sector to summarise what is known about early childhood development in Australia.
System Shift is a non-profit initiative hosted by La Trobe University in Melbourne. The Australian Futures Project collaborated with the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth, the Benevolent Society, Goodstart Early Learning, the ten20 Foundation, and the Mitchell Institute for Health and Education Policy, to produce both papers to inform the initiative.
