Most of a child’s learning happens at home. Here’s how services can help
Our Place has released its fourth Continuity of Learning paper, exploring what services and systems can do to strengthen learning beyond the classroom. The evidence points to a clear gap, and a practical way forward.
Walk into almost any early childhood service, and you’ll find educators working hard to support children’s development. Storytime, play-based learning, language-rich environments. The work is deliberate, evidence-informed and genuinely effective.
But when children leave for the day, they return to an environment that is equally, if not more, influential – the home.
Research has long established that the quality and frequency of learning experiences at home, including shared reading, everyday conversation, play and storytelling, are strong predictors of children’s cognitive, academic and social development.
Despite this, our systems have largely focused on what happens inside services. For families experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage, this gap is particularly consequential.
Our Place’s latest publication, Towards Continuity of Learning: Influencing Home Learning, examines this gap directly. It draws on both the research evidence and the lived experience of Our Place sites to ask: how can universal, place-based services like Our Place meaningfully strengthen what happens at home?
The paper’s answer is not a new program or a resource kit. It is about relationships.
When families feel welcomed, respected and genuinely connected to the services they use, they are more confident in supporting their children’s learning. When practitioners model warm, everyday interactions at playgroup or drop-in sessions, those interactions carry into the home. When services coordinate around families instead of working in silos, the messages children receive are consistent and reinforcing.
The paper includes five guiding principles for partnering with families, a scaffold of practical supports, and real-world snapshots from Our Place sites, including toy library programs in Northern Bay, shared reading initiatives in Westall, language and literacy playgroups in Carlton, and the provision of Look, Say, Sing, Play resources in Morwell.
It also speaks directly to government and policymakers, identifying what system-level conditions need to be in place for any of this to work at scale, such as funding that recognises coordination roles, policy that aligns health, education and family services, and investment in long-term, place-based approaches that build family capability rather than just service attendance.
“Home learning is the responsibility of everyone who works to support children and families. This paper is a contribution for those seeking to understand how we can better support families in strengthening their home learning ecosystem, from the practitioner level right through to system design.”
Elfie Taylor, Our Place Early Years Director
The paper is the fourth in Our Place’s Continuity of Learning Series, following earlier publications on pathways from early learning to school, the rethinking of assessment, and social and emotional learning.
Download Towards Continuity of Learning: Influencing Home Learning at ourplace.org.au/publications.