The 2024 Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) National Workforce Census (NWC) was commissioned by the Department of Education and aims to improve the quality of information used in developing and measuring early childhood policy and programs. This report gives a brief overview of some of the key data on ECEC services and workers, including:…

Childhood is an important time for healthy development and learning, and for establishing the foundation blocks of future wellbeing, but it is also a time of vulnerability. While a positive start in life helps children to reach their full potential, a poor start increases the chances of adverse outcomes for the individual, society and possibly…

The early years from birth to age 8 are a crucial period for children's learning and development. High-quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) and continuity from ECEC into school provide children with a strong foundation for lifelong learning. Understanding how language and cognition skills develop during this period of a child's life…

This evaluation investigated the implementation and outcomes of Be You over the period July 2021 to June 2023, undertaken by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). The focus of this evaluation was on implementation processes, the Be You workforce, and the experiences of Be You users -- the pre-service and current educators who…

UNICEF Innocenti's Report Card 17 explores how the 43 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and/or the European Union (EU) countries are faring in providing healthy environments for children. Do children have clean water to drink? Do they have good-quality air to breathe? Are their homes free of lead and mould? How many…

This Report Card offers an assessment of child well-being in the context of sustainable development across 41 countries of the European Union (EU) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Specifically, this report seeks to bring the SDG [Sustainable Development Goal] targets for children in high-income countries into…

Childhood is an important time for healthy development, learning, and establishing the foundations for future wellbeing. Most Australian children are healthy, safe and doing well. However, childhood is also a time of vulnerability and a child's outcomes can vary depending on where they live and their family's circumstances. This brief brings…

In late 2015, Scholastic, in conjunction with YouGov, conducted a survey to explore family attitudes and behaviours in Australia around reading books for fun. The key findings of this research, based on a nationally representative sample of 1,748 parents and children, including 358 parents of children aged 0-5; 695 parents of children aged 6-17;…

PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) was inaugurated in 2001 as a follow-up to International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement's 1991 Reading Literacy Study. Conducted every five years, PIRLS assesses the reading achievement of young students in their fourth year of schooling--an important transition…

Whether in flight from conflict, with the hope of building a better life, or to seize a social or economic opportunity, people have been crossing borders for as long as there have been borders to cross. Modern means of transportation and communication, the globalisation of the labour market, and the ageing of populations in OECD (Organisation for…

This report sets out the latest internationally comparable data on child deprivation and relative child poverty. Taken together, these two different measures offer the best currently available picture of child poverty across the world's wealthiest nations. Previous reports in this series have shown that failure to protect children from poverty is…

This study used Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) survey data to assess changes in child poverty in Australia between 1982 and 1995-96. The findings suggest a dramatic one-third drop in before-housing child poverty during this period, largely as a result of the very substantial increases in government cash payments to low-income families with…

This paper reports stage 3 of a research project conducted in 40 preschools in Victoria, Australia. During the first stage of this project, preschool teachers were asked about their concerns relating to young children's literacy development. Their responses revealed little access to recent thinking concerning emergent literacy, either through…

Four Australian cohorts (born in 1961, 1965, 1970 and 1975) were studied between 1980-2000. The life transitions study focused on these three traditional markers of adulthood: (1) moving out of the parental home; (2) establishing an intimate relationship; and (3) buying a home. Incidence of these transitions was analyzed in terms of their…