Submission to the House Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Disability on Thriving Kids Initiative.

Our Place, October 2025

Our Experience and Impact

Based on implementation experience over more than a decade, the Our Place approach is currently supporting more than 5,000 children and their families in nine Victorian communities, through 11 schools and early learning services. We do this in partnership with the Victorian Government, 9 local governments and more than 100 service providers, backed by $60 million in philanthropic investment.

The Our Place approach is delivering measurable improvements for children and families experiencing disadvantage including:

• Families are attending Maternal and Child Health appointments at much higher rates — in some communities close to 100%.
• Developmental concerns are being identified earlier, which has reduced the need for referrals when children start school by up to 38%.
• Since 2023, playgroup participation has grown by 41%, and families using services located on school sites are up to 50% more likely to attend than those using offsite services.
• Parents feel more confident — 70% say they are very confident to support their child’s learning — and 81% report their child was well supported to begin school.
• Schools report students up to two numeracy levels ahead of peers. Referrals to services are also increasing, up 79% in the past year, with most now happening face-to-face.

An evaluation report will be released later this year that provides further detailed evidence of the positive impacts of the Our Place approach.

Executive Summary

Our Place welcomes the opportunity to contribute to the Committee’s inquiry into the Thriving Kids initiative.

The intent of Thriving Kids is clear: to identify developmental concerns earlier, to strengthen the role of universal services in supporting families, and to reduce the need for children to rely solely on specialist systems. The challenge is how to implement this effectively. Our Place offers a practical model for doing so, showing how universal services can be connected and strengthened in ways that are effective, sustainable and equitable – improving outcomes for children while also easing pressure on specialist systems.

What Thriving Kids Needs to Succeed

From more than a decade of experience, we know that Thriving Kids will only succeed if families are at the centre. When families trust the people and places around them, they engage. From that engagement, integration can grow. Our Place’s role is to create the conditions where that trust leads to practical connections between families, schools and services.

1. Start with families and the places they already trust.

   Families engage most when support is offered in the places they already know — schools, early learning centres, and playgroups. These are local, trusted and accessible. Our Place uses these platforms to build relationships with families and then connects them into services and supports. The aim is not for schools to ‘do everything’, but for services to work together around families in a joined-up way.

2. Provide the ‘Glue’ that connects families and services.

   Co-location on its own does not build trust or collaboration. Families need someone to walk alongside them, and services need support to work together. Our Place provides that Glue: dedicated roles, governance structures and relationships that link families with services and help providers collaborate. With this support, services on a school site become more than neighbours — they become a pathway families can actually use.

3. Design for equity from the beginning.

   Families experiencing disadvantage are the least likely to access services, yet they are most in need. Our Place’s approach shows that schools as community platforms are especially powerful in these contexts, because they are already trusted and reduce barriers for families who might avoid government services. Too many children start school already behind: 23.5% of Australian children are developmentally vulnerable in one or more domains at school entry, rising to 66.1% for First Nations children and 27.4% for children from non-English speaking backgrounds (AEDC). Thriving Kids must respond proportionately to this need if it is to succeed.

Throughout this submission we return to these conditions: start with families, invest in the Glue that links them to services, and design with equity in mind. This is the role Our Place plays every day in nine communities across Victoria, and it is why we believe our experience can inform the Thriving Kids initiative.

We would welcome the opportunity to discuss any aspect of this submission, and the experience that Our Place has gained over more than a decade working with nine diverse communities across Victoria, with the Committee. We would also encourage the Committee, or individual members, to visit an Our Place site to see firsthand how effective integration can work in practice.

About Our Place

Our Place is an initiative of Colman Education Foundation, who with the support of philanthropic partners, is working in locations across Victoria to implement the Our Place approach – a holistic place-based approach to supporting the education, health and development of all children and families in communities experiencing disadvantage by utilising the universal platform of a school.

Families in disadvantaged communities often face a maze of services that are hard to find, difficult to use, or feel unwelcoming. Too often, children only get support when issues have already become serious.

Our Place began in 2012 at Doveton College, and since 2017 we have partnered with the Victorian Government to expand across nine diverse communities, from regional centres such as Morwell and Robinvale to urban areas like Carlton and Frankston North. Across these sites, thousands of children and families are engaged every year.

At each site, families can find many of the services they need in one place. This includes:

• Early childhood education,
• Maternal and Child Health (MCH) services (the health checks and supports for children from birth to school age),
• Playgroups,
• Family support,
• Links to adult education, training and jobs.

Some sites also include doctors, mental health services or other targeted supports, depending on what the local community needs. Each site employs staff whose role is to connect families to services, help providers work together, and reach out into the community. These are what we call the Glue — the people and relationships that make sure families don’t fall through the cracks and that services work in a coordinated way.

Our Place also acts as the organisation that holds everything together. Schools and services cannot do this alone. Without someone in this role, collaboration often slips back into fragmented programs or depends on individual goodwill. We provide the structure and accountability that keeps partners working together over the long term.

This is supported by clear arrangements at three levels:

• Site Partnership Groups (SPG) bring together school leaders, services, government representatives and community voices to set shared priorities.
• A Partnership Management Group (PMG) links senior leaders from the Department of Education and the Colman Education Foundation to ensure accountability across all sites and escalate issues when needed.
• An Interdepartmental Committee (IDC) connects across government portfolios so that lessons from sites can inform broader reform.

Over more than a decade, this approach has shown that when schools are used as community platforms, families engage earlier and more often. They access the help they need, children are better prepared to start school, and services work together more effectively. At some sites, for example, playgroup participation has risen by more than 40% in just two years — a clear sign of stronger family engagement and trust.

Response to Terms of Reference

1. Examine evidence-based information and resources that could assist parents identify if their child has mild to moderate development delay and support parents to provide support to these children.

Parents are best supported when information is timely, practical, and delivered in places they already trust. While digital tools such as apps and websites can extend access, particularly in rural and remote areas, they are not enough on their own. Families experiencing disadvantage are the least likely to engage through these channels, and digital resources cannot provide the reassurance or professional judgement that parents often need when concerns arise.

Universal platforms — particularly schools — provide familiar, trusted, and non-stigmatising “soft entry points” into the service system. In these settings, parents can raise concerns naturally, and professionals can observe children over time. This combination supports earlier and more accurate identification, as well as timely intervention.

Our Place builds on these universal platforms. By embedding health and family services in schools and employing dedicated integration staff — the Glue — we create pathways where families feel comfortable seeking advice and support. These settings normalise help-seeking, reduce barriers, and reach families who might otherwise be missed.

Examples from Our Place sites show how this works in practice:

• MCH in Playgroups (Doveton pilot): Embedding Maternal and Child Health services in playgroups increased family engagement, lifted attendance at Key Age and Stage visits, and gave parents practical advice on health, parenting and development. At Doveton, refugee-background families engaged in the playgroup doubled their MCH appointments, with 25% more parents initiating contact with MCH and multiple families attending for the first time.
• Facilitated Playgroups using evidence-based programs: Parents gain strategies to support communication, early literacy and social-emotional skills, while also building confidence and stronger relationships with their children. Attendance has shown a steady upward trend over the past three years. Evaluation highlights this has led to improvements in caregiver confidence, program engagement, understanding of play-based learning, school readiness and social connectedness. Playgroups also provide peer support and informal networks of

advice. Because they are embedded in schools, families build familiarity with early learning services and staff, strengthening the continuum of support as children grow.

• Warm referrals: Where a trusted professional personally connects a family with another service. This increases the likelihood families will take up support compared with being given contact details alone.

Standalone programs or digital information channels cannot deliver these benefits on their own. Universal, school as community platforms provide the mechanism for accurate, practical guidance, and ensure that developmental concerns are identified and acted on earlier - particularly for families experiencing vulnerability.

Where services are integrated into universal school settings and supported by Glue, these conditions are met. In contrast, fragmented arrangements often result in disconnected “hand-offs,” with families disengaging before help is in place. Warm referrals — where a trusted professional personally connects a family with another service — are a practical example of how integration sustains engagement.

Examples from Our Place sites illustrate these conditions in action:

• MCH in playgroups: Developmental health checks embedded in playgroups become part of a trusted routine, reducing stigma and increasing take-up.
• Kindergarten-based screening: Bringing checks such as speech, hearing and motor development into early learning ensures concerns are addressed before school starts.
• Group-based allied health: In Mooroopna, the Talk Talk Play! program offered play-based speech support for families waiting for one-on-one therapy, giving children immediate help while also building parent skills at home.
• Screening days and drop-ins: Joint events and informal activities provide families with single, accessible entry points to multiple services, while trusted staff make warm referrals that increase follow-through.
• Aggregated demand: Schools can demonstrate local need at scale, attracting providers into disadvantaged communities where they would not otherwise operate.

Why schools?

Early years hubs can play a role, but schools offer a uniquely powerful platform. They reach every family, provide continuity across the early years and into primary school, and generate the scale needed to attract providers.

In disadvantaged communities, schools are often the one service families reliably engage with. Embedding Thriving Kids within schools ensures access, reduces stigma, and aligns with existing government systems and investment.

The effectiveness of current and future programs will depend on embedding early identification and family engagement into universal school platforms, supported by Glue. It is not new programs alone that deliver outcomes, but the enabling conditions that make them work: trusted settings, integration roles, and sustained collaboration around families.

3. Identify equity and intersectional issues, in particular, children who identify as First Nations and culturally and linguistically diverse.

Children who identify as First Nations, children from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds, and children growing up in low socio-economic communities face higher levels of developmental vulnerability than the population average.

According to the 2024 AEDC, 66.1% of First Nations children and 27.4% of children with a language background other than English are developmentally vulnerable on one or more domains at school entry, compared with 23.5% of all children. AEDC data also shows vulnerability is more concentrated in communities with lower socio-economic status (SEIFA), where children face multiple layers of disadvantage.

These disparities do not close by simply adding programs. Families engage and outcomes improve when services are accessible in trusted, universal settings — and when those services are responsive

to culture, language and community needs. At Our Place, we see that this does not happen automatically. It requires dedicated resources and roles that both build trust with families and work alongside services to change the way they operate. This is the Glue: staff who understand the community, create soft entry points, and advocate for services to adapt to families rather than expecting families to adapt to the system.

At Carlton, over half the families in playgroups speak a language other than English. Engagement has been sustained because bicultural workers, translated materials and familiar staff make it safe for families to participate. Parents report they are more confident to raise developmental concerns when they see the same trusted staff regularly. Evaluation of this site found continuity of relationships was as important as the services themselves.

In Frankston North, the governance group supported by Our Place works with Aboriginal partners to shape local health and wellbeing initiatives. This ensures cultural safety is embedded in decision-making and that First Nations families have a voice in how services are designed and delivered.

Equity also means addressing structural gaps. For example, families on certain visas remain excluded from NDIS supports, yet Our Place sites regularly see these children accessing allied health through school platforms. Without the intermediary role, these families would remain invisible in the system.

Playgroups and Maternal and Child Health outreach embedded in schools provide soft entry points, particularly for families experiencing vulnerability. At Doveton, embedding MCH in playgroups increased Key Age and Stage visits among CALD families who were previously under-represented. These approaches reduce stigma, reach families earlier, and build familiarity with early learning and school environments.

Equity requires a universal but not uniform approach. Thriving Kids must prioritise schools as community platforms in communities where disadvantage is concentrated and invest in the Glue roles that sustain the trusted relationships families rely on to engage. Equally, these roles help services themselves to deliver in more family-centred and culturally responsive ways, lifting both access and quality. Equity cannot be treated as an add-on — it must be built into the design, governance and resourcing of Thriving Kids from the outset.

I understand their role is to connect people to services. If I have a problem or [need to] access a service, Our Place have all the connections.

• Parent (Parent Voice survey 2024)

The school and services here are really connected

• Parent (Parent Voice survey 2024)

4. Identify gaps in workforce support and training required to deliver Thriving Kids

For families, what matters is whether they can connect with support and stay engaged over time. Programs alone do not achieve this. Children and parents thrive when trusted relationships are built, when services collaborate, and when families feel confident navigating the system.

Currently, the workforce is not set up for this way of working. Staff are trained for their own discipline - teaching, health, allied health, or social work - but not for integrated, relational, cross-sector practice. Integration roles are rarely funded or recognised in industrial agreements, and there are few

pathways for joint training or career progression. As a result, families are often left to manage a fragmented system on their own.

Thriving Kids must address these gaps. A sustainable system requires investment not only in clinicians and programs, but also in integration roles — the Glue — that bring services together around families. Navigation alone is not enough. Families need trusted staff who walk alongside them, and services need support to adapt their practice so that engagement is easier, earlier, and more effective. Integration is about both: building trust with families and creating the conditions for services to work in a joined-up, family-centred way.

At Our Place, we have seen how these conditions can be created in practice:

• Dedicated integration capacity (Glue): Funded roles build trust with families, connect them to the right services, and support providers to collaborate. These roles reduce the burden on families to navigate the system and make engagement more sustained.
• Training to work differently: Our Place delivers professional learning for early years educators, playgroup facilitators, and service staff in evidence-based models such as PEEP. This training shifts practice from program delivery to parental capacity-building, helping staff to focus on child development and family confidence.
• Learning systems: Communities of Practice, site-based networks, and shared evaluation tools provide staff with opportunities to reflect, learn from each other, and test practical strategies. This helps new approaches embed into everyday practice but requires dedicated time and resources.
• Conditions for collaboration: As outlined earlier, Our Place governance structures (SPGs, PMG, IDC) are a unique feature of our approach. They give services the support and accountability to plan jointly, share outcomes, and act across boundaries. This shifts the culture from “it’s not my job” to “we share responsibility for these children.”
• Authorisation and leadership: When leaders are visibly encouraged to work across sectors, staff feel both permission and expectation to integrate their work. This addresses one of the biggest barriers: the belief that collaboration falls outside a person’s formal role.

Thriving Kids will only succeed if the workforce is equipped and supported for integration. This means funding Glue roles, creating training and career pathways for integrated practice, and embedding governance and learning systems that allow staff to act collectively around families. Without deliberate investment in these conditions, services will remain fragmented and families will continue to carry the burden of navigating the system alone.

5. Domestic and international policy experience and best practice

Australia does not need to start from scratch.

There is already a strong body of evidence, both here and internationally, showing that schools acting as community platforms — places where education, health and family services are deliberately integrated — improve outcomes for children and families. What these examples make clear is that it is not co-location alone that delivers results, but the presence of staff and structures that connect families with services and ensure providers work as one system. Thriving Kids has the opportunity to build on this evidence base and apply the lessons at scale.

Domestic examples

• Our Place (Victoria): A model of schools as community platforms embedding education, health and wrap around family support. Evaluation shows it reduces developmental vulnerability and sustains family engagement, with integration roles and governance essential to success.
• Challis Parenting and Early Learning Centre (WA): A long-running school-based platform combining 0–3 programs and allied health. Demonstrates how sustained integration on school sites can shift child development outcomes and improve teaching effectiveness.
• FamilyLinQ (Queensland): A state government initiative embedding education, health and family support in schools. Shows the importance of system-level authorisation and evaluation when scaling school-based platforms.
• Community Hubs (National): Over 100 hubs operating in schools to connect CALD families with playgroups, English classes and services. Evaluation found a strong social return on investment, highlighting the value of culturally responsive entry points.

International examples

• Sure Start Children’s Centres (UK): Integrated early years platforms combining education, health and family support. Long-term evaluations show improved child outcomes and cost savings, underlining the importance of sustained government investment.
• Promise Neighbourhoods (US): A “cradle to career” approach anchored by schools. Evidence highlights the value of continuity across age stages, with gains in readiness, literacy and graduation rates.
• Inclusive Hubs (Europe): Platforms in Finland, Portugal, Cyprus and Greece supporting migrant children with language learning, cultural mediation and health services. Demonstrates how integration can remove barriers that otherwise prevent engagement.
• Toronto First Duty (Canada): A universal, integrated school-based platform. Demonstrated feasibility of joined-up delivery, improving child development and parent engagement, and directly informing Ontario’s Best Start reforms.

Lessons across contexts

These examples show that success depends on more than co-location: families engage when staff are employed to build trust and connect them with services, and when governance structures hold providers accountable to act together.

Schools as community platforms are most effective when they are culturally responsive and community-led, supported by long-term funding, clear accountability, and workforce development. Evaluations consistently show positive returns on investment through reduced vulnerability, improved readiness for learning, and downstream savings in health and welfare.

Thriving Kids can draw on these lessons to embed best practice nationally: a consistent framework that ensures the essential conditions — trusted staff, strong governance, workforce capability, and cultural responsiveness — are in place everywhere, while allowing flexibility to respond to local community needs.

6. Identify mechanisms that would allow a seamless transition through mainstream systems for all children with mild to moderate support needs

Families often experience fragmented pathways between services. A child may be identified in MCH, referred to allied health, and then move into kindergarten or school - each step requiring new assessments, paperwork, and relationships. These gaps affect all families, but they are especially damaging for families experiencing vulnerability, who are more likely to disengage when systems feel overwhelming.

To move from a system that simply refers families on to one that provides the supports children need, three mechanisms are essential:

1. Glue: Funded integration roles bring services together around the same child, ensuring warm referrals, shared information, and continuity of relationships. This makes mainstream systems usable for families.
2. Universal platforms: Embedding supports such as MCH, allied health, and developmental screening into settings families already use - playgroups, kindergartens, and schools - provides continuity and reduces the need for families to navigate multiple agencies. While schools as community platforms are not required everywhere, they are especially powerful in disadvantaged communities, where they reach families who are often the hardest to engage.
3. Authorising environments: Governance and funding arrangements must enable leaders to act collectively across sectors and allow mainstream providers to deliver supports flexibly within community platforms.

At Our Place sites, these mechanisms have turned fragmented pathways into connected systems. For example, in Doveton, embedding MCH nurses into playgroups means developmental concerns are picked up early, with warm referrals to on-site allied health and follow-through into kindergarten and school. In Morwell, the community nurse role provides continuity across MCH, playgroups and school, ensuring families experiencing vulnerability remain engaged rather than falling away.

All families benefit from more seamless pathways, but it is families experiencing vulnerability who need these mechanisms the most. For Thriving Kids to succeed, Glue must be formalised as the mechanism that enables services to provide supports, not just refer families elsewhere. This ensures children are identified early and families stay connected to the help they need.

We are connecting families to early years settings. Providing access to needed services. The Our Place team supports language services, access to other services such as immunisations, completing forms, service navigation, enrolments - anything that’s needed.

• Site Partner

Families are totally on board with us connecting them in with [the] Our Place [team]. The families are now accessing the services they need with less barriers.

• Site Partner

Conclusion

Children and families deserve a system that feels connected and easy to use, not one that leaves them to navigate fragmented pathways on their own. Thriving Kids has the potential to deliver this - but only if it invests in the conditions that make services work together around families.

Our Place shows what is possible when schools act as community platforms, with Glue roles and governance structures that connect services and sustain trusted relationships with families. In this context, developmental concerns are picked up earlier, families remain engaged, and mainstream services operate as a coordinated system rather than a collection of separate programs.

For Thriving Kids to succeed, it must fund these conditions — dedicated integration roles, universal platforms in disadvantaged communities, strong governance, and culturally responsive practice — alongside clinical and program delivery. This is what turns well-intentioned reform into practical, sustainable support for the families who need it most.

We encourage the Committee to back these conditions for success so that Thriving Kids can deliver on its promise for all children, especially those experiencing vulnerability. We would also welcome the opportunity to meet with the Committee to discuss this submission further, and to host members at an Our Place site. A visit provides the clearest view of how integration works in practice and the impact it has on children, families and communities.

Families are engaging with the services here far more than they would if those services were offsite.

• School Principal

Service access is very good with the Our Place team facilitating. There is increased collaboration, and families are not falling through the cracks.

• School Principal

Sources Consulted:

Australian Early Development Census (AEDC), National Report 2024. Australian Government Department of Education.

Community Hubs Australia / Deloitte Access Economics, Community Hubs Social Return on Investment Report (2023).

Challis Parenting and Early Learning Centre (WA), Evaluation findings (Government of Western Australia).

FamilyLinQ (Qld), Program overview (Queensland Government Department of Education, 2023).

Harlem Children’s Zone / U.S. Department of Education, Promise Neighbourhoods: Cradle to Career Supports (2019).

Ontario Ministry of Education / Toronto First Duty Research Team, Phase 1 Final Report (2005).

Our Place, 2025 Evaluation Report (pending publication — collation of findings across Our Place sites) (Colman Education Foundation).

UK Department for Education, Sure Start Children’s Centres: Long-term evaluation reports (various).

For further information, please contact Elfie Taylor, Director Early Years, Our Place.

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