Witness Statement Royal Commission into Early Childhood Education

The decade-long build and millions of dollars of investment into the BEBOLD platform supports research to inform and evaluate approaches to intractable health and social problems such as poor child development, mental health, child maltreatment, and intergenerational disadvantage, while preserving confidentiality and privacy. [...] • The North can be a vanguard for innovation We need a placed based initiative to build human, family, and community capital in the North that is an exemplar for how ECEC can lead the transitions from a set of ‘systems’ to an integrated ecosystem to support human, family and community well-being. [...] Information infrastructure has to be purpose designed in parallel to designing service innovations, not as an after-thought assigned to out-sourced evaluations that are always limited by the ‘data we have’ and then the realization that we should have collected data along the way so we have the ‘data we need.’ 5 OUR EVIDENCE Population growth in the North • There are about 450,000 people living in. [...] For example, there were 497 children in the North notified to child protection before they entered school, compared to 459 for other metro areas combined • ECEC innovation needs to be state-wide but if we fail in the North we are less likely to succeed overall (e.g., improving SA AEDC) and we will not reduce the stark inequities between the North and the rest of SA. [...] • Similar concepts that resonate with these ideas are being trialled in other parts of the world – e.g., creation of the “GoLab” at Oxford University in the UK ( ) • We suggest something along the lines of a “CORE Lab” – Community Outcomes Research and Evaluation Lab - a way of knowing what works that is sensitive to community ownership of delivering our ambitions for bui.