The Health and Development Participation Grant provides funding to eligible early childhood education and care providers to support implementation of the Health and Development Checks in Early Childhood Education Program in 2024
Key information
- Status: Closed
- Grant amount: $7,500
- Application opened: 7 February 2024
- Application closed: 31 March 2024
Program objective
The HDP Grant funding aims to support early childhood education and care providers to embed suitable strategies to enable their partnership, and children’s participation, in the HDC Program. The key objective of the HDP Grant is to increase awareness of and engagement with the HDC Program.
This program is administered by Department of Education.
Eligibility
Who can apply
- Not-for-profit community preschool (centre based or mobile);
- Not-for-profit long day care (as identified in the National Quality Agenda IT system, or where sufficient evidence is provided upon request), including a local government managed service;
- Multifunctional Aboriginal Children’s Service*;
- Aboriginal Child and Family Centre*
- Aboriginal Controlled Community Organisation*; and
- Standalone for-profit long day care (defined as for profit providers operating a single long day care service as identified by the National Quality Agenda IT system);
Types of projects funded under this grant
Implementation of the Health and Development Checks in ECEC program in 2024
What your application needs to include
Prepare your application with this checklist
To be eligible for the HDP Grant, the services must meet all the following criteria:
- Be an approved provider under the Children(Education and Care Services) National Law Act 2010(NSW) and be one of the following:
- Not-for-profit community preschool (centre based or mobile);
- Not-for-profit long day care (as identified in the National Quality Agenda IT system, or where sufficient evidence is provided upon request), including a local government managed service;
- Multifunctional Aboriginal Children’s Service*;
- Aboriginal Child and Family Centre*
- Aboriginal Controlled Community Organisation*; and
- Standalone for-profit long day care (defined as for profit providers operating a single long day care service as identified by the National Quality Agenda IT system);
- Must deliver an early childhood education program to children aged 4 and above.
- Must agree to participate in the HDC Program by the end of 2024*
* An alternative criterion for Multifunctional Aboriginal Children’s Service; Aboriginal Child and Family Centre; Aboriginal Controlled Community Organisation is that they deliver a health and development check through an Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation. For the purpose of these Guidelines health and development check through an Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation will be deemed to be and should be read as the HDC Program.
Approved providers would need to have an active, up to date account in ECCMs and agree to the Terms and Conditions of the HDP Grant including the acquittals process.
Address the eligibility criteria
Each applicant, as part of an application response, must confirm that they meet the eligibility criteria.
Applicants that do not address the eligibility criteria in full may be excluded from the application process at the department's discretion.
After the application is submitted
Successful applications will be decided by: Deputy Secretary, Early Childhood Outcomes, NSW Department of Education
The Department will assess applications and determine funding based on service eligibility (set out at Section 3.1 of the Guidelines), spending rules (Spending rules are defined in Section 5.1 of the Guidelines), program priorities and available funding.
Applications that satisfy the eligibility and spending rules will be approved up to the limit of total available funding.
If the number of eligible applicants exceeds the total grant funds, the Department will apply the following hierarchy in prioritising applications:
- Aboriginal Child and Family Centres, Aboriginal community controlled organisations (ACCOs) delivering early childhood education and care or partnering with early childhood education and care services, Multifunctional Aboriginal Children’s Services.
- Eligible ECEC services with higher proportion or high number of Aboriginal children
- Eligible ECEC providers located in areas with a SEIFA quintile of between 1-3, according to the index for relative socio-economic advantage and disadvantage (IRSAD).[i]
- Other ECEC providers operating a service that meets the service eligibility criteria.
There may be applicants who satisfy the eligibility and assessment criteria but are not awarded a grant, as preference will be given, according to the hierarchy above, in equity considerations.
[i] The Socio-Economic Indexes for areas (SEIFA) IRSAD from the Australian Bureau of Statistics ranks areas according to socio-economic advantage and disadvantage based on census data. These spending rules use the SEIFA IRSAD to identify and preference approved providers that are more likely to educate children experiencing disadvantage. SEIFA IRSD for the location (SA2) of each service applying for the grant will be calculated using 2021 ABS data..
Support and contact
EarlyChildhoodDevelopment@det.nsw.edu.au