Introduction
The First Five Years Project is a collaborative endeavour involving project partners from across government and the university sector. The project aimed to create an enduring data asset linking a measure of childhood development (including physical health and wellbeing, social competence, emotional maturity, language and cognitive skills (school-based), and communication skills and general knowledge) with family, social, economic and health data and data about early childhood education and care attendance and quality. This enables researchers to better understand the effects family, social, economic and health events and circumstances have on early child development using integrated data held by government.
The Multi-Agency Data Integration Project (MADIP), which has since been renamed the Person Level Integrated Data Asset (PLIDA), was a partnership among Australian Government agencies to develop a secure and enduring approach for combining government datasets to create a comprehensive picture of Australia over time. MADIP was used to integrate multiple data sources for the First Five Years project, including the Australian Early Development Census (AEDC), child care administrative data, the Census of Population and Housing, tax, health and welfare data.
The project was supported by the Data Integration Partnership for Australia (DIPA), a three-year partnership across 20 Commonwealth agencies which commenced on 1 July 2017 and ended 30 June 2020.