Abstract

Many Governments around the world turned their attention to early childhood policy and service provision throughout the early 2000s, and the Victorian State Government within Australia was no different. Over the past six years, the Victorian Government has reformed the early childhood education and care system substantially. The factors leading to this emphasis on early childhood reform were not straight-forward. This article adapts Richmond’s and Kotelchuck’s (1983) model for examining the interacting forces shaping public policy to make sense of how early childhood so successfully found itself at the centre of the Victorian Government’s reform agenda. It concludes that far from being random, it was a combination of political will, a rich, expanding and interdisciplinary knowledge base and a well-developed social strategy for the application of the knowledge base that led to early childhood being at the centre of the reform agenda. It concludes that much of the evidence by which the reform agenda was informed came from studies conducte d internationally and that more Australian research is needed to investigate early childhood program effectiveness in our own local context if the momentum is to continue.