Policy and Equity
Advancing equitable, sustainable and measurable improvements in children’s health, development and wellbeing.
The Policy and Equity group aims to advance equitable, sustainable and measurable improvements in children’s health, development and wellbeing. We sit within the Centre for Community Child Health.
Our purpose is Every child thrives.
Inequities in health, development and wellbeing emerge well before a child begins school. Currently, one in five children begin primary school developmentally vulnerable – lacking the experiences or environments they need because of preventable social, economic or geographic circumstances.
The rapid development that occurs in the early years provides the best opportunity to establish the conditions that enable children to thrive. By investing wisely, we raise awareness of the significance of early childhood and prevent or tackle issues early, rather than relying on costly complex solutions when problems are entrenched.
The Policy and Equity group includes three teams:
- Policy and Service Development Unit
- Child Health Equity
- Mental Health
We work collaboratively, conduct discovery and applied research and undertake consultancies for governments and non-government agencies. We provide training and development for childhood practitioners and evidence-informed advice to governments and community agencies.
For over 25 years the team’s work has informed policy, service delivery, professional practice and parenting.
We also develop innovative approaches that have successfully progressed along the impact pipeline to be translated into action in local and national communities and have led to improvement in population outcomes.
We prioritise six areas for impact:
- Healthy child development
- Mental health for life
- Connected and confident parents
- Education, health and social care working together
- Equitable services
- Thriving communities.
Our research, expertise and experience show that investing in these key areas will deliver the greatest benefits for children’s health, development and wellbeing.
Group Leaders
Team Leaders
Group Members
Our projects
COVID-19 Policies and Maternal Child Health
This study will provide robust evidence of the potential benefits and harms of COVID-19 policies on health outcomes during pregnancy, birth and the first 12 months postnatally; translating these findings into health service provision.
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Kids in Communities (KiCS)
The Kids in Communities Study (KiCS) is working to understand how different factors in our communities - physical environment, social environment, socio-economic factors, access to services, and governance - influence how children develop.
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Understanding Consent in Research Involving Children: The Ethical Issues
This study is completed.
This study brought an understanding and greater clarity on the complex topic of consent in research involving children.
Read more...Raising Children Network
The Raising Children Network (RCN) is an Australian government-funded initiative delivering online resources and information to parents, carers and professionals caring for children.
Producing the website raisingchildren.net.au and associated digital products, RCN has been funded by successive Australian governments since 2006 to publish up-to-date, scientifically validated information about raising children from pregnancy-18 years.
Working with 400+ experts in child health and wellbeing, learning and development, RCN has developed 3000+ resources that help parents support their children’s health development and intervene early when issues arise.
The website receives 150,000 visits per day (51 million page views in 2021) and its resources are used by health, education and community professionals working with children and families.
Restacking the Odds
Restacking the Odds recently completed research (Phase 1) to develop and apply evidence-based lead indicators for the effective delivery of the five fundamental strategies (antenatal care, sustained nurse home visiting programs, early childhood education and care, parenting programs and the early years of school).
These indicators define how the strategies should be delivered across three dimensions: quality, quantity and participation (Restacking Framework).
Phase 2 will be supported by Paul Ramsay Foundation with nearly $ 7 million until 2025. Partnering with Social Ventures Australia and Bain & Company our goal is to create awareness and embedded usage of the Restacking framework of lead indicators at the scale needed to accelerate system-level change and make a real difference to disadvantaged children across Australia.
We aspire to make it common practice for ECD stakeholders to measure and act on lead indicators, informed by a methodology like the one we have developed. To do this, we intend to create a streamlined, repeatable approach that can be reused across an extensive set of service providers and communities.
Mental Health in Primary Schools (MHiPS)
The Centre, along with partners at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education and the Victorian Department of Education, developed a new model of school mental health support.
The MHiPS model helps build the capacity of Victorian primary schools to support the mental health and wellbeing of students by training experienced teachers to become Mental Health and Wellbeing Coordinators in primary schools.
Feedback from participants in the MHiPS pilot program in 2020 has been overwhelmingly positive. The Victorian Government funded the expansion of the model to 26 Victorian primary schools in 2021. An additional 100 primary schools will join the program in 2022.
By Five Innovation and Equity Hub
The By Five Innovation and Equity Hub is a place-based initiative of the Wimmera Southern Mallee Regional Partnership that aims to improve the health and wellbeing of children and young people across five developmental domains in five geographic clusters.
The Hub brings together research bodies, service providers, practitioners and families to build on what already exists and to co-create and trial innovative, place-based services and intervention strategies for children and young people.
The By Five Innovation and Equity Hub is a partnership between the Wimmera Development Association, the Wimmera Southern Mallee Health Alliance, the Victorian Government, and the Centre for Community Child Health.
Integrated Child and Family Centres
The vision of the program is for children in Australia who experience socio-economic vulnerability to have access to high quality, integrated early childhood development services that support them and their families to thrive. The overall goal for this work is for a national early childhood development policy framework and corresponding service system that provides high quality integrated early childhood development supports to children from birth to six years. We are partnering with Social Ventures Australia on this initiative.
Changing Children’s Chances (CCC)
The Changing Children’s Chances (CCC) project aims to work collaboratively with policymakers to create new evidence to inform more effective and precise policies to reduce inequities in children’s mental health, physical health, and academic achievement.
The project uses innovative causal analytic methods with robust existing data sources to determine how cross-portfolio policy levers (such as parent mental health, family income support, preschool, and the neighbourhood-built environment) can reduce inequities in children’s development. CCC has been awarded three years of matched funding nearly $1 million (2021-2024) from the ARC Linkage Program and partner contributions.
The University of Melbourne and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute are partnering with Beyond Blue, the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation, the Australian Government Department of Health, the Australian Government Department of Social Services and the Brotherhood of St Laurence.
Empowering Parents, Empowering Communities (EPEC)
EPEC is a community-based program training local parents to run parenting groups (in pairs) through early years and parenting focused services.
Parent Facilitators trained to work in the EPEC program are employed, supported and supervised by a specially trained practitioner within a local community organisation. Developed and tested by the UK Centre for Parent and Child Support, EPEC encompasses the best of current theoretical and practical knowledge and provides an alternative model to practitioner-led parenting interventions.
The Family Partnership Model
The Family Partnership Model (FPM) has been used successfully in Australia Since the early 2000s. This evidence-based relational change model emanates from the UK and has emerged as a leading approach in supporting practitioners and their organisations, in a wide variety of contexts and settings, to work in partnership with families.
It does this through supporting an improved understanding of the processes and skills of helping; more effective use of practitioner’s technical expertise; and, the provision of resources and tools that enable individuals to be purposefully reflective in their work with parents and colleagues.
The Policy and Equity group delivers training online and face-to-face in FPM.
Platforms
Platforms is a place-based, community-led approach developed by the Centre for Community Child Health that seeks to improve the environments and experiences of children in the communities in which they are born, live, learn and grow.
The approach is informed by evidence and over 15 years of experience applying Platforms in communities across Australia. Platforms provide guidance on how to strengthen community ‘platforms’ – such as safe and supportive neighbourhoods, connected families and high-quality services – for better health and equity for children and their families.
Platforms include a roadmap, guide, resources, training and support to help communities plan, implement and evaluate place-based change.
The Language of Child Mental Health (Frank Oberklaid)
Health professionals, educators and families use distinct language to talk about children’s mental health. For example, schools use words such as wellbeing and resilience, while health professionals use terms such as problems, disorders, and DSM-based diagnoses.
Discussion of child mental health has focused on the treatment of children with severe and entrenched problems, rather than prevention and early intervention. We have introduced the concept of a continuum to describe child mental health, with good mental health at one end and severe at the other, and with anchor points of coping and struggling in between.
The concept has been widely supported by parents and professionals, and we are now undertaking empirical research to reach a consensus on the exact words that will underpin the continuum.
The outcome of this work will be a universally accepted and used common language for child mental health.
Funding
- Paul Ramsay Foundation
- Erdi Foundation
- Danielle Besen
- SALT Catalyst Foundation/WOLF Foundation
- Ian Potter Foundation
- Victorian Government Department of Education
- Australian Government Department of Education
- Australian Government Department of Social Services
- Australian Research Council
- National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)
- Creswick Foundation
- Cameron Foundation
- John Barnes Foundation
- Gandel Philanthropy
- Royal Children’s Hospital Foundation
Collaborators
- Centre for Community Child Health Royal Children’s Hospital
- The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Graduate School of Education
- Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth (ARACY)
- Social Ventures Australia (SVA)
- Wimmera Development Association and the Wimmera Southern Mallee Regional Partnership
- Parenting Research Center
See our full list of Our supporters and collaborators - The Royal Children's Hospital.
Featured publications
- The First Thousand Days: An Evidence Paper. 2017
- Developing holistic integrated early learning services for young children and families experiencing socio-economic vulnerability. 2021
- Optimising child and adolescent health and development through an integrated ecological life course approach. 2021
- Nurse Home Visiting for Families Experiencing Adversity: A Randomized Trial. 2019
- Potential of 'stacking' early childhood interventions to reduce inequities in learning outcomes. 2019
- The impact of multidimensional disadvantage over childhood on developmental outcomes in Australia. 2018