3 | The Child Rights Impact Assessment tool • Including the views of children: As shown in Appendix 3, while there were some measures taken to seek the views of children and young people on the impacts of COVID-19 and the policy responses at the time, these were inconsistent. It is unclear how any views that may have been expressed by children and young people influenced decisions to close schools, or actions to mitigate against the negative impacts. While seeking the views of children and young people may be difficult in an emergency response situation, the application of the CRIA process revealed that there are a number of other mechanisms for seeking the views of children and young people, that could be employed by policy-makers when assessing potential impacts, including through the Children’s Commissions across Australia. • 18 | Confirmation bias: There were both negative and positive impacts identified as a result of the ECEC and school closures. However, it is clear that care needs to be taken to avoid bias when assessing positive and negative impacts, during the identifying and gathering information stages, and the assessment stages. A systematic consideration of all rights affected will help to mitigate this bias. While it is not possible to determine whether the positive and negative impacts of ECEC and school closures would have been different if a CRIA had been used by policy-makers/law-makers at the development stage, applying this CRIA tool retrospectively provides some important information when considering emergency measures in the future. Once the tool had been applied to the issue of ECEC and school closures, it was further refined, drawing on learnings from the process. The final template of the CRIA tool is included in Appendix 1. 3.3 Using the tool The tool template (see Appendix 1) is split into 7 sections, which include 18 questions on the nature of the proposed policy/legislation being assessed, the types of information to be considered when assessing impacts on the rights of children, the potential impacts, how impacts can be mitigated or strengthened, and an overall consideration about how the policy/legislation acts in the best interests of children.