AEDI

The Australian Early Development Index (AEDI) is a population measure of young children's development. Like a census, it involves collecting information to help create a snapshot of children’s development in communities across Australia. Teachers complete a checklist for children in their first year of full-time school. The checklist measures five key areas, or domains, of early childhood development:

• Physical health and wellbeing
• Social competence
• Emotional maturity
• Language and cognitive skills (school-based)
• Communication skills and general knowledge

These areas are closely linked to the predictors of good adult health, education and social outcomes.

As a population measure, the AEDI places the focus on all children in the community; it examines early childhood development across the whole community. By moving the focus of effort from the individual child to all children in the community we can make a bigger difference in supporting efforts to create optimal early childhood development.

In 2009, for the first time, the AEDI was completed nationwide, providing a snapshot of the early childhood development outcomes of Australian children.

A population measure places the focus on the population as well as the individual. The AEDI examines early childhood development across the whole community. Moving the focus from the individual child to all children in the community can make a bigger difference in supporting efforts to create optimal early childhood development. The AEDI can be used by communities, schools and policy makers in conjunction with other resources (such as state and national statistics) to plan and evaluate efforts to create optimal early childhood development.

Between 2004 and 2008 the Building Better Communities for Children project trialled the AEDI in 60 communities across Australia. This involved 2,157 teachers from 1,012 schools (both government and non-government) from every state and territory (with the exception of the Northern Territory).

Additionally, the AEDI is based on the Canadian EDI which has involved over 520,000 Canadian children.

The AEDI is conducted by the Centre for Community Child Health (at The Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne, and a key research centre of the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute) in partnership with the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research, Perth. The Australian Government have provided $21.9 million to implementation the AEDI nationally. The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) has also endorsed the AEDI as a national progress measure of early childhood development in Australia.

The Early Development Instrument checklist was originally developed in Canada (the Canadian EDI) where it has undergone extensive pilot testing and has been compared with direct assessment results and parent reports. It has also been repeated on the same group of children within a short space of time, demonstrating reliability in all these tests. In the process of the development, the EDI checklist has also been refined using detailed input from teachers.

In Australia, the EDI checklist was first trialled in the northern metropolitan suburbs of Perth in 2002 and 2003, with around 4,300 children.

A national Technical Advisory Group consisting of leading experts, researchers and government policy makers was formed to advise on the development of the AEDI Checklist. The AEDI checklist has been further adapted and validated for Australia.

The purpose of the AEDI is to measure the health and development of populations of children to help communities assess how well they are doing in supporting young children and their families. Previously there has been no way to monitor early child development at a community level or to understand how local circumstances might be changed to improve children’s life chances.

By using the AEDI to map children’s development it is possible to begin to identify and understand the influence of socio-economic and community factors on children’s development. The AEDI can also be used to monitor changes over time.

Teachers complete the AEDI Checklist for children in their first year of full-time school using the simple and secure web-based data entry system.

The AEDI Checklists are completed based on teachers’ knowledge and observations of the children in their class. Children are not required to be present while teachers complete checklists.

Schools were provided with funding for teacher relief time (it takes teachers around 20 minutes to complete an AEDI Checklist).

Teachers were provided with a detailed Guide for Teachers, and undertook one hour of training, to help them accurately complete the AEDI Checklists for the children in their class.
Teachers are highly skilled professionals with an understanding of early childhood development issues. This makes them well-placed to observe the development of children as they enter school.

Studies in Canada have confirmed the reliability of teacher reporting by using different teachers to report on the same children.

Participation in the AEDI was not compulsory. However, schools advised parents in writing of the school’s participation in the AEDI. If parents did not want their child’s teacher to complete an AEDI Checklist for their child, they could ‘opt-out’ by contacting the teacher or school principal directly.

Individual children cannot be identified in the AEDI results; the names of individual children are not recorded in the data sent to the AEDI National Support Centre. Additionally, the web-based data entry system is a secure site for data entry.

Research has shown that both genes and environment play a role in children's development. During a child's first few years in life, their brain develops at a rapid rate and these first few years provide a window of opportunity to support their development.

The experiences a child has in these early years have a major impact on their course in life and in shaping the adults they will become.  Building a solid foundation for a child in these early years provides the best chances for their health, wellbeing and success at school and beyond.

Parents and families have a significant ongoing influence on their children. Community influences are smaller but more widespread, so while they act less on individual children, small changes for many children can alter outcomes dramatically for a whole population.

There are physical and social features of communities which affect child and family functioning and wellbeing. The characteristics of the physical and social environment in a community can be modified to support family functioning and wellbeing to a greater or lesser degree.

The national AEDI population is made up of all the children who participated in the AEDI nationally in 2009, i.e. 261,203 children in their first year of full-time school.

A region is a collection of AEDI communities, usually a statistical division within a state or territory. An AEDI community is a geographic area made up of AEDI local communities, usually a region’s local government area. An AEDI local community is a small area locality within an AEDI community, usually a suburb.

Children who score in the lowest 10 per cent of the national AEDI population are classified as 'developmentally vulnerable'. These children demonstrate a much lower than average ability in the developmental competencies measured in that domain. Children who score in the top 75 per cent of the national AEDI population are classified as ‘on track’.

For communities with small numbers of children, or where demographic data are incomplete, AEDI results will not be available in 2009. For those communities with small numbers of children, follow-up data collection will occur in 2010. The final national release of results for communities will be in early 2011.

The green shadings on the maps represent five ranges of developmental vulnerability.

Areas shaded in lighter greens have lower proportions of developmentally vulnerable children and areas shaded in darker greens have higher proportions of developmentally vulnerable children, compared to the national AEDI population.

The pie chart on the maps page shows how data are spread across a community.  The size of each slice of the pie corresponds to the proportion of local communities within that range.

The results table shows the proportions of children in the local community developmentally vulnerable on the AEDI domains, the number of children on track and the number of children surveyed.

It is important to consider both the proportion of children developmentally vulnerable and the number of children this represents. A higher proportion does not necessarily mean a large number of children. Similarly, a low proportion in a large community may still equate to a large number of children.

The AEDI results tell you what is happening, but there is more information to help you understand why this is happening. Additional community information taken from the 2006 ABS census is mapped, to help provide the community’s local context.  These include:

• SEIFA Index of Relative Socio-Economic Disadvantage
• Proportion of people who have completed year 12 or equivalent
• Proportion of persons who lived at a different address one year ago
• Proportion of single parents aged under 25 years
• Proportion of the labour force unemployed.