The Australian Early Development Index
The Australian Early Development Index (AEDI) is a population-based measurement of young children’s development in communities across Australia, which gives us a national picture of our children’s health and development, being the first study of its kind ever undertaken in Australia. The results highlight strengths in the community as well as what can be improved and provide information to help us build and support our communities. In 2009, the AEDI was completed nationwide with information collected on 261,203 children, which was an amazing 97.5 per cent of the estimated national five-year-old population.
Some of the unsettling findings included: poverty and unemployment are creating conditions that produce under-achieving children on the fringes of Australia’s big cities, generally falling behind in their physical, social and emotional development at double the numbers of children from better off areas. Surprisingly though, even in affluent areas an alarming proportion of the children who started school this year are considered “developmentally vulnerable”. That means they may be behind in their physical development, emotional maturity, cognitive or communication skills.
In a fringe area of Melbourne, where the median household income is about $861 per week and the unemployment rate is over 10%, nearly 30% of the children were deemed to be “developmentally vulnerable”. About 15% were below average in communication skills and social competence. Sadly it is the indigenous children who fare the worst, with nearly 50% considered “developmentally vulnerable”. And in the Northern Territory’s remote Tennant Creek, where family income is half the national average, two-thirds of the children are rated as “developmentally vulnerable”. In other words, only one in every three kids who started school in Tennant Creek this year has been rated as being “on track” in terms of physical development, and nearly half are vulnerable in terms of their communication skills.
Low socio-economic level has long been identified as a key indicator of the problems that this index is reframing now: illiteracy, below-average mental and physical health, unemployment, welfare dependency, and criminality. The children of this socio-economic group arrive at school with under-developed language, cognition, social skills, and physical health and will stay that way throughout school, and throughout their lives, unless they receive targeted intervention. They will then grow up to become the next generation of parents who do not provide healthy, intelligent, stimulating and socially useful settings for their children and the pattern is once again repeated. An observer of human history may be tempted to despair by such predictable social patterns.
So what will be done with this new AEDI study? One result will be that many thousands of young Australian children in their first year at school will now be targeted for special assistance. This report will put pressure on governments to act by providing funds for schools across Australia to help the children do better in language, physical health, emotional maturity, social competence and communication skills so they can grow up to lead socially productive and satisfying lives. I will watch this progress with great interest.