What is Restacking the Odds?

Restacking the Odds (RSTO) is an initiative of the Centre for Community Child Health at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Social Ventures Australia and Bain & Company. We work with local early years partnerships to build a stronger stack of early years services using actionable data.

We equip partners with tools and resources such as a data dashboard, a lead indicator framework and continuous improvement training to make timely changes that strengthen quality, access and participation.

When children and families participate in multiple services over time—like parenting support and early learning—the benefits add up. We call this ‘stacking’, and it can powerfully improve outcomes for children and families.

Phases

The RSTO initiative involves three main phases:

  1. Building the evidence: Completed
    The project’s first phase of research developed evidence-based indicators for communities and services to use to enhance service delivery. Unique indicators were developed for five key early childhood services. The indicators aim to help service providers, local early years partnerships and policymakers better understand how services could be delivered across quality, quantity and participation. RSTO worked with 7 communities to develop and test how practical and helpful the indicator framework was to each community. Access the RSTO Indicator Guide.
  2. Co-designing the RSTO Learning System: Completed
    This phase built on the progress and lessons from phase one. RSTO worked with 13 partners to co-design, implement and test a series of practical and scalable tools that support the collection and use of lead indicator data to strengthen service quality, quantity and participation. This began to enable policymakers, communities and service providers to apply local approaches to address challenges. Read the RSTO 2.0 Impact Report.
  3. Scaling RSTO: 2025-ongoing
    This phase will expand RSTO’s application and adoption on a much larger scale. The purpose of expanding the reach and application of RSTO is to accelerate system-level change and make a sustainable difference to children experiencing adversity across Australia. Phase three will enable new communities across Australia to access RSTO resources.

Restacking the Odds is a collaboration between the Centre for Community Child Health at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Bain & Company and Social Ventures Australia.

RSTO would like to acknowledge the support of project partners the Minderoo Foundation, Paul Ramsay Foundation and PALO IT.

We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which we work and pay our respect to Elders past, present and emerging.