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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 State Government has provided funding to the ESB to help assess services more frequently.

The Office for Early Childhood Development (OECD) and South Australian Education Standards Board (ESB) are working together to help services, rated as Working Towards NQS, to raise their quality.

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.

Making child health and development checks more accessible to families

Data from the 2024 Australian Early Development Census (AEDC) showed that nearly a quarter (24.5%) of South Australian children had delays in at least one developmental domain when they started school. These domains include physical health and wellbeing, social skills, emotional maturity, language and cognitive skills, and communication skills and general knowledge.

Increasing access to child health development checks is in line with recommendations from the Royal Commission into Early Childhood Education and Care. This is essential to help services identify children’s developmental needs earlier and connect families to more supports when needed.

We are aiming to increase the number of Aboriginal children who are developmentally on track in all 5 AECD domains, by improving access to culturally safe developmental screening. This will also support Closing the Gap Target 4.

The procurement process for expanding child health and development checks is now complete. Thank you to all organisations that submitted proposals.

For a list of partner providers, see Child Health and Development Checks.

Have a question?

Email the Child Health and Development Checks team on OECD.CHDCinfo@sa.gov.au