Welcome to Child Care Choices

The Child Care Choices project is a collaboration between researchers at Macquarie University, Charles Sturt University, the Department of Community Services and the Australian Institute of Family Studies. The project has attracted significant interest in New South Wales and nationally, and has received a high level of financial support from the Australian Research Council Linkage Grant Scheme and the NSW Department of Community Services.

The project is unique in that it builds on an extensive data set, and a large sample of families who have given their informed consent for the research. The study has documented early childhood care and experiences in a large sample recruited in metropolitan, regional, and rural areas of NSW. Background information collected to date, and in the prior-to-school component of the project, includes:

• families' use of formal and informal care;
• the mix and changes of children's care arrangements over time;
• consistency of care arrangements within child care settings;
• quality of formal care settings from birth to 5 years, including education experiences in the year immediately prior to school entry;
• hours of care children experience in both formal and informal care;
• provision of preschool-to-school transition programs;
• indicators of school readiness in the year prior to school

The project will also document families' use of government-regulated outside school hours care and care outside the regulatory system as children enter primary school. The mix and changes of outside school hours care arrangements over time will be recorded, as will the use of vacation care.