Despite improvements to early education, more children are starting school developmentally behind. What’s going on?

So far, 2025 has been a horror year for early education and care. Much of the recent media and political coverage about childcare has focused on safety. This is understandable, given the numerous, shocking allegations of abuse in the sector.

But early childhood education should be doing more than keeping children safe. It is also supposed to help them learn and develop and ultimately, be on track for school.

Our latest study suggests early education is not making as much of a difference as it should when it comes to young children’s development and learning.

We compared data on children’s development with their attendance at daycare, preschool and other early learning services. We found improvements in early childhood education quality since 2009 have not been accompanied by improvements in Australian children’s development.

How do we track development?

The Australian Early Development Census tracks the development of all Australian children in their first year of formal school. Information for the census is collected by teachers.

It looks at five areas:

• physical health and wellbeing

• social competence

• emotional maturity

• language and cognitive skills

• communication skills and general knowledge.

The latest 2024 results revealed a decreased percentage of children assessed “developmentally on track” – from 54.8% in 2021 to 52.9% in 2024.

There was also in increase in children flagged as “developmentally vulnerable” in two or more areas – from 11.4% in 2021 to 12.5% in 2024. This is the highest percentage of developmentally vulnerable children starting school since data collection started in 2009.

Our research

Going to high-quality early childhood education or preschool is one way to ensure children do not fall behind before they even start school.

So in our study, we set out to investigate what was happening to Australian children who attend an early learning service. Our study looked at census data from 2009 to 2021.

How does learning in early education work?

Since 2009, the Early Years Learning Framework has been used in Australian early childhood education and care to ensure consistent quality across services.

It is billed as a national guide to “extend and enrich children’s learning from birth to 5 years and through the transition to school”.

It’s not prescriptive like the school curriculum, given it is for young children. For example, the framework wants to see children develop a strong sense of identity, be confident learners and effective communicators.

At the same time, the quality of services is assessed against the National Quality Standard. Overall, quality ratings assessed against the National Quality Standard show enormous improvement. In 2013, 59% of rated services were at least meeting the national quality standards. By 2021, 87% were at least meeting the standards.

Outcomes for children in early education settings

Our research showed from 2009 to 2021, the proportion of Australian children attending early education and care in the year before they start school increased from 83% to 86%. In particular, attendance in the year before school jumped from 66% to 81% for children in very remote locations, and from 72% to 87% for children in remote locations.

Because service quality has increased and the number of children attending early learning has increased, we expected to find improvements in children’s development from 2009 to 2021.

In our study, we grouped the developmental data for children who attended early education and care in the year before school. Then we grouped the developmental data for children who did not attend early learning in the year before school. We compared averages of the two groups over time.

We found children who attended early learning and care had higher developmental scores on all five areas in every year of assessment from 2009 to 2021. This was good to see.

Shouldn’t we be seeing more improvements?

But since quality and attendance had both increased, we expected to see the gap between the two groups increasing over time.

We expected the average for children who had attended early learning and care would steadily increase because the quality of early childhood education and care was reported to have improved over the same period.

But we did not find this. As you can see from the charts above (on cognitive skills) and below (on language skills and general knowledge) averages for the two groups stayed pretty stable despite improvements in quality according to the national quality standards.

So, what’s going on?

It is hard to know for sure.

It could be the Australian Early Development Census is not precise enough to pick up on the aspects of children’s learning and development that are supported by attending early childhood education and care programs.

We definitely need more information about how frequently children attend early learning and care, how much time they spend there, and the quality of the services children are attending because this varies a lot.

It is possible children who spend the most time in early learning are going to services of lower quality. Or that services “meeting” the national quality standards may not be of high enough quality to improve children’s learning outcomes.

A 2019 study found some services rated as “exceeding” the national quality standards (the highest possible level) were rated at basic levels of quality using other, research-based scales.

Other studies have found services need to be “exceeding” the standards to reduce a child’s developmental vulnerability.

Why do the development census results matter?

Federal and state governments are spending huge amounts of money to encourage families to send children to early childhood education and care settings and to preschool/kinder.

For example, in December 2024, the federal government pledged an extra A$1.47 billion to build more centres and for new fee subsidies. Next year, all eligible Australian children will be able to access three days of subsidised early learning and care a week.

We need to know that attending early childhood education and care programs will make a difference to children’s learning and development. Looking at the whole group of children attending early childhood education and care from 2009 to 2021, we did not see this.

We may need to collect better data from the development census (and researchers are currently looking at how to improve this). Alternatively – and this would be a significant change – policymakers may need to look more carefully at what aspects of early childhood education are prioritised in Australia, and to identify what makes the most difference to children’s early learning and development.