5:15 pm – 6:15 pm

Day 1 - Plenary Session 1
History of Monitoring Early Childhood Development in Canada:
Celebration of Dan Offord’s Contribution

Clyde Hertzman - The EDI as a Tool for Equity from the Start
The EDI is the world's most successful and widely-used tool for monitoring the state of early child development.  It has played a fundamental role in building the emerging global consensus that early development is a social determinant of health, and a broad societal responsibility.   The EDI's success is due to the ease with which the EDI can be implemented across whole populations; its validity as a surrogate measure of brain and biological development; and its capacity to galvanize a focus on the earliest stages of human development from all walks of life.

Magdalena Janus - Natural History of the Early Development Instrument
To make Dan Offord’s dream of reducing children’s burden of suffering through universal prevention a reality, it is necessary to build a body of information applicable for populations of children.  The Early Development Instrument (EDI) was designed to provide data, which could be aggregated to a population level, and when interpreted with other data sources, lead to information useful for all children.  The development, characteristics, and current use of the EDI will be reviewed in this presentation, highlighting Canadian and international data.   

J. Fraser Mustard - Early Human Development and Later Development
Offord was a colleague during the period when I was the Dean of Medicine at McMaster. He had a strong interest in how early child development affected mental health and behaviour. In Offord’s work as a child psychiatrist, he wanted to better understand the causes of mental health and behaviour problems in young children. When the Ontario government asked Margaret McCain and I to prepare a report on early human development, we set up an advisory committee. Dan was a key member of this committee. As we prepared our report, we found little good population based data about early development of children in Ontario and Canada. Dan had us recommend that the province establish a measure of child development for all young children in Ontario. With the help of McMaster and the government of Ontario, we recruited Magdalena Janus to work with Dan to develop the Early Development Instrument (EDI) that could be applied to all children when they entered school. They developed and tested the measure with children coming in to kindergarten. Ten years later the EDI has been used in most of Canada, Australia, and other countries. It has been shown to be a reliable measure of early child development based on the new knowledge from developmental neurobiology. This allows communities and governments to have a robust measure of early development that predicts school performance as well as health development in later life. We would not have developed the EDI measure without Offord’s leadership.

6:30 pm – 7:30 pm Keynote Address

Sir Michael Marmot - Fair Society, Healthy Lives (Information coming soon)

9:00 am – 10:15 am

Day 2 - Plenary Session 1
Monitoring Early Childhood Development in Developing Countries

Sally Brinkman - The Status of Early Child Development in poor communities across Indonesia
Indonesia currently faces considerable issues of poor early child development. Twenty seven percent of children under 5 are malnourished and 53 percent of children aged 1-4 suffer from anemia. These poor heath outcomes are particularly concentrated among the poor. Although a variety of ECD services currently exist, utilization is low and concentrated among the rich with less than 17% percent of children aged 2 to 6 enrolled in any ECD service among the poorest regions. In response, the Government of Indonesia in collaboration with the World Bank has launched a community based approach to increase access to early childhood development services (the Early Childhood Education and Development Project). This project started in 2008, has a total budget of $127mln (USD), and targets an estimated 738,000 children aged 0 to 6 living in 6,000 of the poorest communities across Indonesia.  This presentation provides the baseline results for the evaluation of this program and as such provides Indonesia the first available data to quantify how children in Indonesia are faring in comparison to other countries in the World.

Helia Molina Milman (Information coming soon)

Alfredo Tinajero - Measures of Early Human Development in Latin America
The development of the architecture and function of the brain is most plastic in the early years [conception to age six].  Equity from the start is important for Latin America for healthy development of all children.  Early Brain Development affects health, learning and behaviour throughout the life course.  Population-based measures of early development are important for countries trying to improve early development.  Some regions of Latin American countries [Monterrey-Mexico, State of Rio Grande do Sul-Barzil] are using the EDI [an age five measure] with similar results as what we had found in Canada.  Birth weight, Infant mortality and under five mortality are measures of early development which differentiate Cuba from other Latin American countries in respect to Cuba's outstanding results in the UNESCO Grade 3 and 4 studies in Latin American schools.

10:45 am – 12:00 pm

Day 2 - Plenary Session 2
EDI in Australia

Sharon Goldfeld - The EDI in Australia: The Development and Implementation of a National Measure of Early Childhood Development
It is now understood that life success, health and emotional well-being have their roots in early childhood. Consequently early childhood development outcomes have become important markers of not only the welfare of children but also predictors of future health and human capital.  Within this context the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) selected the Australian Early Development Index (AEDI) as a national progress measure to reflect the importance of early childhood development within its human capital reform agenda. This commitment included funding from the Australian Government for the first national AEDI census.  As a result, in 2009 there were 261,203 AEDI Checklists completed (representing 97.8% of the five year old child population) by 15,531 teachers from 7,423 government, Catholic and independent schools (95.6% of eligible schools). This presentation will provide the history of the AEDI from a small pilot of 200 children through to national census and the policy context that aided the progression of this work. The presentation will conclude with exampling how the AEDI is now embedded in National and State policies.

Sally Brinkman - The Status of Early Child Development in Australia – Population Census Results
The first national developmental census of 5 year olds across Australia now provides governments, service providers and communities a comprehensive evidence base on which to inform their policies and practices.  This presentation will provide some interesting analyses that show the patterns and distributions of developmental vulnerability across our country. The results challenge us when thinking about getting the right mix of universal and targeted services by showing significant gaps in child development across socio-economic regions, remoteness of communities and culturally diverse communities. However despite such strong patterns, the bulk of the burden of developmental vulnerability still sits within middle class Australia. The presentation will conclude with the scientific work that is now being planned by embedding the AEDI in data linkage opportunities and longitudinal studies.

Sven Silburn - Establishing the Measurement Equivalence of the Australian EDI for Indigenous Children
The AEDI Indigenous Adaptation Study was initiated to maximise the cultural inclusiveness of Australia’s first national census of early child development. Extensive consultation was undertaken with Indigenous Australian educators, parents and other stakeholders across urban, rural and remote settings. Existing AEDI data were also analysed using Rasch modelling to identify specific items and scales operating differently for Indigenous children. In addition to informing modifications to the AEDI checklist and administration processes, the study developed and trialled a set of communication resources to facilitate community use of AEDI findings for local planning and action.

1:00 pm – 2:15 pm

Day 2 - Plenary Session 3
Early Childhood Development in the United States: Policy & Research

Marilyn Essex - Early Risk Factors for, and Adolescent Outcomes of, Primary School “EDI” Scores in a U.S. Community Sample
This presentation focuses on longitudinal “EDI” data from a U.S. community sample followed from birth to age 18 years (Wisconsin Study of Families & Work; WSFW). The WSFW uses the MacArthur Health and Behavior Questionnaire (HBQ), which was developed collaboratively with Dan Offord and shares substantial overlap with several domains of the EDI, especially in the area of socio-emotional development. After illustrating the EDI/HBQ overlap and briefly describing the WSFW and other U.S. studies using this instrument, the presentation will highlight WSFW longitudinal findings, especially regarding early risk factors for “EDI” socio-emotional difficulties in the primary school years, trajectories into late adolescence, and policy implications.

Joan Lombardi (Information coming soon)

Neal Halfon (Information coming soon)

2:30 pm – 4:00 pm

Day 2 - Plenary Session 4
Canadian Research & Future Directions

Petra Arck - Stress during Pregnancy: Maternal Endocrine-Immune Imbalances and Fetal Health
An emerging area of research called ‘developmental origins of health and
disease’ currently focuses on the identification of environmental insults
during pregnancy. Such environmental insults have been proposed to induce
permanent neuroendocrine and immunological changes to the offspring,
causing an increased susceptibility to develop chronic disease later in
life. Maternal stress perception during pregnancy has been confirmed as a
potent environmental factor which can program the fetus leading to chronic
diseases such as schizophrenia or depression later during post-natal life.
Disorders of the immune system leading to allergies, inflammatory bowel
disease, and multiple sclerosis also merit consideration since
epidemiological data evidence a steady rise in the incidence of such
disorders over the past five decades. Our research pursued to date
employing cohort studies and fundamental research reveals insights on how
maternal stress perception during pregnancy generates a risk for the
offspring to develop chronic diseases in later life, such as allergies and
anxiety-like behaviour.

Michel Boivin - Predicting Early School Achievement Trajectories from the EDI and Tutti Quanti; Findings from the Québec Longitudinal Study of Child Development.
Low literacy and school dropout are persistent problems challenging the Canadian society. There are known risk factors for these difficulties, but limited reliable data on prediction and developmental processes. There is a clear need for longitudinal studies examining the early (i.e., preschool) predictors of school difficulties. The presentation will draw upon data from an ongoing population-based birth cohort, the Québec Longitudinal Study of Child Development, to show that (1) school achievement trajectories are established early in school; (2) school difficulties can be accurately predicted from child-level school readiness indicators (i.e., EDI & Lollipop scale) at the end of the preschool period; and (3) these school readiness indicators mediates the contribution of earlier preschool risk factors to school difficulties. The implications of these results for monitoring ECD in Canada will be discussed.

Jim Dunn - Healthy Child Development at Different Levels of Social Organization
It is sometimes acknowledged that factors at different levels of social organization (the family, the home, the neighbourhood, the region, the nation-state) have an impact on healthy child development, but the theoretical underpinnings of this kind of thinking are not well-developed and not well integrated. This presentation will make a contribution to a more integrated understanding of the influence of factors at these different levels of social organization.

Paul Kershaw - Smart Family Policy:  Measuring and Monitoring its Development Across Canada
With Early Development Instrument (EDI) data, Dr. Kershaw and other HELP researchers have been able to document the societal costs imposed when nearly 30% of the population reaches kindergarten vulnerable, as is the case in BC and many other Canadian provinces.  These costs include lower population-level graduation rates, poorer grade achievement, higher rates of crime, and compromised economic growth.  In response, Kershaw and colleagues have developed a smart family policy framework that will help children, support families and grow the Canadian economy.  His talk will identify the policy changes required in Canada to achieve this framework, and share results from a research project designed to track policy progress federally and in each province.  The project evaluates family policy support available in Canada to comparable policy in 20 other OECD countries.