Kids First: Kindergarten Model Evaluation

Overview

What is the Kids First Kindergarten Model?

The Kids First Early Years Education Program^TM — Kindergarten Model (‘Kindergarten Model’) is a trauma-informed early years education model. The model draws on the relationships between people, places and things in children’s lives to enhance and extend their learning and development.

Why is this issue important?

Kids First’s experience and research tells us that education and care is important to the development, health and wellbeing of children and their families. Education and care is especially important for children who are at heightened risk of, or who have experienced, abuse and neglect. 

Kids First believes that all Australian children and families should have access to high-quality, holistic education and care, underpinned by a robust practice framework and evidence-based service models. This led Kids First to develop an early education and care model that is now practiced by their staff and delivered through participating kindergartens.  

The evidence-based Kindergarten Model offers holistic education and care to enable children to develop safe and strong caregiving relationships with their early years educators. The model assists children and their parents to develop the skills they need to support strong, healthy families. 

The model blends high-quality teaching and learning with support services that ‘wrap around’ children and families (Figure 1). This helps to address a child’s identified developmental needs, reduce the impacts and risks of adverse, traumatic events, and strengthen family functioning. 

The model meets and exceeds the requirements of the Australian Early Years Learning Framework and Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework. 

Figure 1: Kindergarten Model overview 

What does the Kindergarten Model hope to achieve?

The Kindergarten Model seeks to ensure that:

• Children have strong, authentic relationships with their classmates, families and educators, and a shared sense of belonging.
• Children are active, engaged and capable learners, and are supported to enter primary school.
• Families have strong protective factors so that they can moderate risk and adversity and promote healthy childhood development and wellbeing.
• Kindergarten staff retention is higher than benchmark. 

What does the Kindergarten Model evaluation involve?

We’ve partnered with Kids First Australia to evaluate their implementation of the Kindergarten Model. The evaluation explores whether the Kindergarten Model can be offered in a way that benefits all pre-school age children. 

Specifically, the evaluation seeks to:

• provide evidence of a cost-effective, impactful and scalable model
• inform the ongoing implementation and adaptation of the model. 

Kids First will use evaluation findings to advocate for funding to continue and expand the Kindergarten Model.

We’re evaluating the model through biannual cycles of data collection, analysis and reporting (Figure 2), from 2021 to 2024. This enables us to:

• understand the model and how it is implemented
• promote continuous improvement of its design and delivery (Figure 3)
• measure the impact of the model.

Figure 2: Kids First Kindergarten Model Evaluation timeline.

Figure 3: Kids First Kindergarten Model Evaluation process.

Our impact and achievements

We began the evaluation at three kindergarten services in 2021 and expanded to an additional three kindergarten services in 2022. The six services continued participating in evaluation throughout 2023.

In 2024, evaluation is underway at 11 kindergarten services at an organisational and service level.

At an organisational level, we’re collating and analysing data from all services. We’re collaborating with Kids First management to understand findings and identify and test areas of improvement.

At a service level, we’re collating and analysing data for each service. We’re identifying what works well and areas for improvement through workshops with the lead teacher and staff at each service.