A community approach to improve outcomes for children
Helping raise the quality of South Australia’s early childhood education and care services
The Education Standards Board (ESB) of South Australia assesses early childhood education services for quality against the National Quality Standard (NQS). Services can receive one of these ratings in the NQS:
- Excellent
- Exceeding NQS
- Meeting NQS
- Working towards NQS.
The OECD and South Australian Education Standards Board (ESB) will work together to help services, rated as working towards NQS, to raise their quality.
The government has provided funding to the ESB to help assess services more frequently. If you have questions about assessments and providing quality education and care services to your community, visit the ESB’s early childhood website and the Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA) website.
We will engage with and support services achieving meeting and exceeding ratings through targeted intervention programs, currently under development.
Connecting services for the best start
Families are at the heart of healthy child development. Engaging with families early in their parenting journey is incredibly important. The OECD work with Child and Family Health Service (CaFHS) and other stakeholders to offer support through health and development checks and the Early Years SA app, but families can still find it hard to know what to do and where to find help during a child’s early years. Visit the CaFHS Services Overview webpage for the full list of services CaFHS provides.
Families don’t always find their way into early childhood services, and particularly those with complex needs. Coordinated effort is needed to reach families with information and support about their role in their child’s development, and how to access services in their child’s early years of life. We want to create an early childhood system that ‘sees and responds’ rather than ‘sees and refers’ to a child’s needs, with strong connections between maternal and child health services in the early years.
The OECD is building on South Australia's proud history of integrated service provision currently offered by the statewide network of Department for Education Children's Centres for Early Childhood Development and Parenting. OECD integrated hubs will offer early learning, up to 30 hours of preschool a week for identified 3- and 4-year old children and programs and services to support children and families based on community need and interest. The hubs will aim to offer connected services and programs in the one location.
The government is already expanding the availability and uptake of child health and development checks across South Australia, which is essential to help services identify children’s developmental needs and connect families to more supports where they need them earlier in life.