Year in review

Published
Tuesday, December 12, 2023 - 9:20 AM

Improving early years service quality, quantity and participation is key to enhancing children's health, development and wellbeing. However, improvement or change doesn’t just happen on its own. This year, Restacking the Odds (RSTO) has focused efforts across advocacy, research and implementation to help drive meaningful change in early years service provision in various communities.

We have successfully raised awareness of the importance of 'stacking' key services across the early years. The concept of 'stacking' and the use of lead indicators were included as key recommendations in SA's Royal Commission into Early Childhood Education and Care.

We have been working closely with our service and community partners to co-design an easy-to-use data system, referred as a ‘data dashboard’, and a continuous improvement program, to help build the capabilities of practitioners to collect, understand and use quality, quantity and participation data to improve outcomes. Check out a case study of this work with Gowrie Victoria.

In addition, evidence-based practice continues to shape our work and the work of our partners, with Logan Together and the Thriving Queensland Kids Partnership incorporating RSTO research into their policy and program design. 

Lastly, we have been building on our partnerships to enable more place-based initiatives and early years services to access and apply RSTO data dashboards, resources and supports from 2024 and beyond.

Looking ahead

We have identified several learnings from our work this year that are helping to shape RSTO’s 2024 priorities. These include: 

  • strengthening our engagement and implementation resources to continue to support our current partners and be able to expand our supports to enable other services and communities to ‘stack’ key early years services and programs
  • continuing to develop and refine our prototypes, including  our data dashboards (see Figure 1 below) and continuous improvement programs, to support early years services to use data and lead indicators to improve service provision
  • capitalising on the significant policy interest and work that is taking place in the early years and place sector.

Figure 1: Sample RSTO data dashboard

 

Restacking the Odds is a collaboration between the Centre for Community Child Health at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Bain & Company and Social Ventures Australia.

RSTO would like to acknowledge the support of project partners the Paul Ramsay Foundation and PALO IT.

We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which we work and pay our respect to Elders past, present and emerging.