4240.0.55.001 - National Early Childhood Education and Care Collection: Concepts, Sources and Methods, 2012

ARCHIVED ISSUE Released at 11:30 AM (CANBERRA TIME) 13/03/2013

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Contents >> Concepts and Definitions >> Data Processing and Reporting Concepts >> Reporting Child Counts

REPORTING CHILD COUNTS

After completing within-file linking, between-file linking, and child-episode, the National Collection contains the unique child level records which are used in all child level tables in the publication. These records can be of the following three types:

a child with records solely from a state/territory source

a child with records solely from a CCMS source

a child with records from both a state/territory and a CCMS source.

Where two or more child episodes are linked, the unique characteristics within each episode are used to formulate the characteristics of the corresponding unique child record. Figure 3.13 outlines two linked episodes from two different preschool programs with weekly preschool fees, enrolment and attendance hours. This information is used to create a unique child record from the same data source supplied for the National ECEC Collection.

Figure 3.13: ‘Child Episode Record to Unique Child Record'

For the purpose of output reporting on hours enrolled, hours attended and preschool fees, the child’s multiple episode records are combined to obtain the total preschool program hours and total preschool program fees.