In June 1995 the Federal Government received the evaluation report on the national accreditation and quality improvement system for long day child care centres (Coopers & Lybrand Consultants 1995). The evaluation had been commissioned to investigate four issues: the quality improvements resulting from accreditation; the financial costs to centres of accreditation; the adequacy of resources provided to assist centres with accreditation; and any problems centres had encountered with the system. This paper focuses on the evaluation's findings with respect to the first term of reference, the exact wording of which was ‘to measure improvements in the quality of care attributable to the system’.
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