Excerpts
Families with kids juggling full-time work may have been alarmed by media reporting this week, suggesting “too much” time in early childhood education and care could harm their child’s development.
Data from a major Australian study, the First Five Years project, was released by the Department of Education last December. It tracked 274,000 Australian children and linked their experiences of early childhood education to their development in the first year of school.
The report found those who spent 40 hours or more a week in care were slightly more likely to be “developmentally vulnerable”, compared to the national average. But the data also showed that kids who attend formal care – which includes childcare and preschool – had notably better outcomes compared to those who didn’t attend at all.
Importantly, the report confirmed what we’ve long known: quality of care is still a stronger and more consistent predictor of a child’s outcomes than the number of hours they spend there. And parenting can be more important than both quantity and quality of childcare.
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A child is considered “developmentally vulnerable” in a domain if they score within the lowest 10% of the national benchmark for that domain, based on the first Australian Early Development Census data from 2009.
This is not the same as being diagnosed with a neurodevelopmental or learning disorder or intellectual disability.
So, what’s the link to hours in care?
The national average for a child in early childhood education and care is 34.2 hours a week.
Among children who attended formal child care between 30–35 hours a week, the First Five Years project found 22% were developmentally vulnerable in at least one domain.
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And there’s another important comparison: children who didn’t spend any time in formal care before starting school had a much higher risk, with 37% considered developmentally vulnerable in one or more domains.
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This confirms international evidence which has established that formal early childhood education benefits children’s learning and development – particularly among disadvantaged groups.
The Australian study found children who attended formal care were consistently more likely to be “on track” across all developmental domains, compared to those who didn’t. This was true even when they attended for 30 hours or more a week.
The report shows the benefits of formal care can be even more pronounced among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, those whose families speak a language other than English, and single-parent and low-income families.
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