CANBERRA, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Almost half of Australian children are not meeting developmental milestones by the time they start school, according to a government report.
The Federal Department of Education on Monday released the 2024 edition of the Australian Early Development Census (AEDC), which is conducted every three years to assess how children have developed by the time they start their first year of full-time school.
It found that 52.9 percent of the 288,423 children who were assessed were developmentally on track across all five tracked domains -- physical health and wellbeing, social competence, emotional maturity, language skills and communication -- down from 54.8 percent in 2021.
It represents the lowest proportion of participants who were on track on all five domains since the inaugural AEDC in 2009.
Among participants in the 2024 census, 23.5 percent were facing significant developmental challenges in at least one domain and 12.5 percent were facing significant challenges in two or more, up from 11.4 percent in 2021 and the highest figure in AEDC history.
Across all five domains, fewer children were on track in 2024 than in 2021.
In remote Australia 43.1 percent of children were developmentally on track across all domains compared to 50.5 percent in larger regional areas and 54 percent in major cities.
The proportion of Indigenous Australian children developmentally on track in five domains fell slightly from 34.3 percent in 2021 to 33.9 percent in 2024.
Australia's state, territory and federal governments have set a target of 55 percent of Indigenous children being on track on all five domains by 2031.
Children from the least disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds were 19.9 percentage points more likely to be on track in all domains than those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds in 2024. ■
