Healthy Beginnings

Healthy Beginnings is a co-designed early intervention project focused on improving access to support for children with unmet health and developmental needs in early childhood education centres. The project brings together families, educators and healthcare professionals to design and test an intervention that supports children before they start school.

The challenge

Many children enter school with unmet developmental, behavioural or health needs, more commonly in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities and rural or regional areas. Families can face long wait times, limited access to services and fragmented pathways to care.

Our approach

Healthy Beginnings uses a co-design process to develop an early intervention model embedded within early childhood education centres (ECEC). This includes interviews with parents and caregivers, focus groups with ECEC staff, co-design discussions with healthcare professionals, and a refinement intervention prototype.

Following this, the project progresses to the Healthy Beginnings Pilot Feasibility Trial, where the co-designed model is implemented and evaluated in ECEC across NSW and VIC to assess how practical, acceptable and effective it is in real-world settings.

Key goals

• Understand barriers and facilitators to early support for children with health and developmental needs.

• Identify the needs and expectations of families and early childhood educators.

• Co-design an early intervention model that can be embedded within early childhood learning centres.

• Strengthen pathways to earlier identification, referral and support before school entry.

• Develop a logic model to guide future implementation and evaluation.

• Assess the feasibility, acceptability and early impact of the model through a pilot trial implemented in diverse communities.

Evaluation & impact

The project includes the development and testing of a prototype early intervention system within ECEC settings. The pilot feasibility trial evaluates whether the model can be successfully implemented, is acceptable to families and educators, and improves early identification and access to care for children with unmet needs. Findings from this stage will inform future scale-up and a larger trial, with the aim of improving school readiness, reducing unmet need and strengthening early pathways to care