BACKGROUND TO CREATING UNIQUE CHILD RECORDS
To derive estimates of the ‘number of children’ enrolled in and attending preschool, a collection methodology is required to transform episodes of preschool to the child level data and to link records across files to estimates of unique children.
For the 2012 National ECEC Collection, the ABS implemented an enhanced methodology for linking of child records within and between source data files. This methodology was introduced to improve the Collection further by maximising the coverage of data provided to the ABS. In 2013 a similar enhanced methodology was adopted to process the Collection.
The following discussion provides information on the 2013 methodological procedures in relation to how child data were reconciled into the collection output populations: ‘Episodes of preschool’, ‘Children’ and ‘Children in the Year before Full-time schooling’ (YBFS).
A child record consists of one or more episodes.