In February 2015, the Productivity Commission (PC) released their final Inquiry Report on Childcare and Early Childhood Learning. The Government's final response to this report is not yet known, but there are likely to be significant policy changes with regards to Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in Australia. Alongside this general debate, one of the six Closing the Gap targets developed by the former Labor Government and continued by the current Coalition government is to ensure that all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children aged 4 years in remote Australia have access to early childhood education. Access is important, and it was a troubling finding that the measure used to monitor this target does not look like being met. However, physical access is only a small component of the policy challenges related to Indigenous ECEC identified in the PC report and elsewhere. The aim of this seminar is to present and discuss the quantitative evidence on what influences whether or not an Indigenous child will be enrolled and participate in ECEC, as well as the relationship between participation and short- and long-term outcomes. In the presentation, it will be argued that the current measures used to assess the effectiveness of ECEC policy need to be carefully thought through (particularly with regards to Indigenous children), as they have the potential to distort the policy focus.

Nicholas Biddle is a Research Fellow at CAEPR.