3 | The Child Rights Impact Assessment tool • it is difficult to access relevant supporting data about children • politics often outweighs evidence • for a CRIA tool to be implemented successfully and consistently, there needs to be oversight and coordination. Following the interviews and reflecting on the themes gathered, a workshop was conducted with 2 Children’s Commissioners and some of their teams to consider the initial design question together. This discussion led to several ideas that were used to prototype the tool, including that the tool needed to be simple and the importance of children’s voices as part of the assessment process. Other feedback was that the tool should be explicitly inclusive of the CRC. A prototype tool was developed. This was workshopped with a broader group who agreed that the tool needed to be simpler, shorter, and written in plain English. Consideration was also given to the CRIA tools increasingly used by governments and nongovernment organisations (NGOs) overseas,17 and to the CRIA tools used in ACT, Queensland, and WA.18 The tool also largely draws on the European Network of Ombudsperson for Children’s Common Framework of Reference on Child Rights Impact Assessment.19 The prototype tool was refined by applying it to the policy and legislative decisions to close ECEC and schools between March 2020 and March 2022 during the COVID-19 pandemic. The process of applying this tool is discussed in detail in section 3.2. The tool was subsequently modified based on learnings from this process, and consideration of how to best assess policy/ legislation using available information. 16 | 3.2 Applying the CRIA tool to the closure of ECEC and schools during the COVID-19 pandemic In Australia, the COVID-19 pandemic led to ECEC and schools being closed intermittently between 2020 and 2022. New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria were most affected due to the spread of the COVID-19 virus, and lockdown measures put in place by their respective governments to limit the spread of the virus. See Appendix 2 for background information on ECEC and school closures during the pandemic in Australia. The closure of ECEC and schools during the first 2 years of the pandemic presented an opportunity to explore how the CRIA tool could be applied in the Australian policy or legislative context. The aim of applying the CRIA tool to ECEC and school closures was not to review or evaluate the decisions made in the various jurisdictions, but to assess the usefulness of the CRIA process, in order to develop a CRIA sufficiently flexible to apply across all Australian jurisdictions and all circumstances affecting children and young people, including emergency situations. Decisions about ECEC and school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic were considered relevant for testing the CRIA tool for several reasons: • There was significant community concern about the potential for negative impacts of ECEC and school closures on children, especially for children experiencing poverty or disadvantage.