 There is research potential to enhance our understanding of the place and the experience of children wards of the state that could be obtained through oral history interviews with former residents and staff, and through documentary research using the annual reports of the successive welfare departments which were responsible for the site during its history.The place possesses uncommon, rare or endangered aspects of the cultural or natural history of New South Wales.Challoner Cottage is of local significance for its rarity as the only institutional-style building built in the mid-twentieth century at Mittagong Farm Home, and as such provides physical evidence of the change in policy from providing domestic-scale cottage accommodation to larger, dormitory-style accommodation after the introduction of the Child Welfare Act of 1939.