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Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
Time: 3:44 am
Time: 3:44 am
Results for child protection (australia)
1 results foundAuthor: Barbour, Bruce: NSW Ombudsman Title: Keep Them Safe? A Special Report to Parliament under s31 of the Ombudsman Act 1974 Summary: The statutory child protection system in NSW has long struggled to cope with demand. For close to a decade, the system has undergone extensive reform aimed at improving the capacity to respond to children1 for whom serious safety concerns exist. Throughout this period, and in line with this office’s statutory role to oversight the child protection system, we have monitored the extent to which these reforms have improved the safety of vulnerable children. Stemming from recommendations made by the 2008 Special Commission of Inquiry into Child Protection Services in NSW (the Wood Inquiry), the former government’s reform program - Keep Them Safe: A shared approach to child wellbeing - represents a significant shift in the way that child protection and early support services are delivered in this state.2 Keep Them Safe aims to make child protection a shared responsibility across government and between government and non-government agencies, and to limit the statutory role of Community Services to children ‘at risk of significant harm’. Keep Them Safe also comprises a strong investment in universal and early intervention services, with the expectation that, over time, this will lead to a reduction in the number of children requiring statutory protection and out-of-home care services. In addition, the Wood Inquiry and Keep Them Safe recognise the need for the non-government sector to become a more significant partner in the delivery of child protection services, including a commitment to transfer responsibility for delivering most out-of-home care services from the government to the non-government sector. In keeping with the strong focus of the Wood Inquiry on improving service delivery to Aboriginal children and their families, Keep Them Safe also contains specific actions to enhance the capacity of service delivery to Aboriginal people, including responses to Aboriginal families in contact with the child protection system. It is now over 18 months since Keep Them Safe commenced. It is timely to document and discuss the progress that has been made, and some of the challenges currently facing the service sector. An important starting point for this work is analysing data from Community Services about the agency’s current operating environment. That data illustrates that significantly fewer child protection reports are coming into the statutory child protection system as a result of changes implemented under Keep Them Safe. However, the data - which relates to the first 12 months of operation of the new system - does not appear to reflect a corresponding increase in the recorded capacity of Community Services staff to undertake more face-to-face work with families. Given that a key objective of Keep Them Safe was to limit the number of child protection reports being made to Community Services so it could focus on those children most at risk of serious harm, we questioned whether this objective is being met. For this reason, we initiated an inquiry under section 11 of the Community Services (Complaints, Reviews and Monitoring) Act 1993 to examine whether Community Services’ capacity to adequately respond to children assessed as being at risk of significant harm has improved as a result of changes to the child protection system introduced through Keep Them Safe. This report examines this, and related issues, and makes a range of findings and recommendations. Details: Sydney: NSW Ombudsman, 2011. 26p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed March 11, 2012 at http://www.ombo.nsw.gov.au/publication/PDF/specialreport/SR%20to%20Parliament%20-%20keep%20them%20safe.pdf Year: 2011 Country: Australia URL: http://www.ombo.nsw.gov.au/publication/PDF/specialreport/SR%20to%20Parliament%20-%20keep%20them%20safe.pdf Shelf Number: 124444 Keywords: Child Abuse and NeglectChild Protection (Australia)Evaluative Studies |