Centre for Community Child Health

The story so far

The Centre for Community Child Health (CCCH) is a department of The Royal Children’s Hospital and a research group of the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. Beginning in 2025, Polyglot artists and the CCCH researchers are working together to engage with children in community healthcare settings and early childhood education centres (ECEC), using Voice Lab, as well as making with paper, tape and drawing.

The findings are being used to refine the CCCH Voice of the Child toolkit – a free, evidence-based resource designed for researchers, service providers, clinicians and others keen to include children and embed their voices in meaningful, ethical ways. The findings will also inform the development of capacity-building materials that will support and empower communities, services and other organisations to ensure they are adequately responding to the needs of young children.

“Both activities asked the educators to be more theatrical than they usually are… What was wonderful about this, and the collaboration was that we were able to normalise that experimentation for them and help to open up new ways for the educators to bring that sort of experimentation into their classroom practices. Not just in the theatricality of the activity offered, but also in the examination of different ways of expression from the children, not just verbal but through drawing and making and abstraction… Multiple modes of expression across both activities allowed for the children to engage in the ways they felt most comfortable.” Artist workshop report, ECEC

As part of our 2025 activity in community healthcare settings, Voice Lab spoke to children about visiting new places, sharing their feelings, and being heard by their adults. This is what they told us:

“Numerous children asked if we would be there again the next time they came. One asked if they could come again tomorrow. A parent offered to bring their child back again later in the week even though they didn’t have an appointment, and we were also told that we would be missed by some of the children. It was pretty amazing to see kids proactively wanting to come back… due to the creative interventions that we were offering.” Artist workshop report, health setting.

Thank You

Polyglot Theatre’s project, Creative Kids Thrive! was supported by VicHealth through the Growing Healthy Communities grant. This included Polyglot’s participation in research at community healthcare settings in 2025, conducted in partnership with CCCH.

CCCH would like to acknowledge Minderoo Foundation, for their support to test and refine the Voice of the Child toolkit in early childhood education and care settings across Australia.