Page 4070 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 23 October 2018
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fundamental shift in the provision of services in the out of home care sector. In order to determine the overall success of the strategy, the ACT government engaged the specialist services of KPMG to develop an outcomes based evaluation framework, including indicators to measure strategy outcomes; conduct an initial baseline review to determine the suitability of measures and establish a performance benchmark; and perform a mid-strategy evaluation against the agreed outcomes. Having worked with the Community Services Directorate and our partner agencies over the past six months, I am pleased to advise that KPMG is in the final stages of preparing the mid-strategy evaluation for release later this year.
A fundamental tenet of the out of home care system is the trauma-informed, comprehensive assessments for children and young people in out of home care. As at 30 June 2018, 355 children and young people had a therapeutic assessment report completed. The assessments look at different areas of a child’s or young person’s life, such as health and development, emotional and behavioural development, education and training, family and social relationships, self-help skills, culture and identity, and indicators of trauma in the child or young person.
Child and youth protection services is currently working in partnership with the Australian Childhood Trauma Group to ensure that more children and young people in out of home care and their carers benefit from having a therapeutic assessment in place.
As members are aware, the step up reform does not occur in isolation. The Community Services Directorate is acutely aware of the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in the statutory child protection system and continues to develop better ways of working in order to respond to the issues and drive change in this area.
The primary focus of the Our Booris, Our Way independent review, which I announced in June 2017, is to inform systemic improvements to child protection systems, policies and practices. The review aims to understand the reasons for children and young people entering care and develop strategies to reduce the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people entering care, improve their experience and outcomes while in care and, where appropriate, exit children from care through restorations.
I welcomed the release of the interim report by the Our Booris, Our Way steering committee on 31 August. The interim report makes a number of recommendations about the child protection system including case allocation, revision of policies and practice through to how child and youth protection services engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families where a child or young person is entering the system. Most importantly, the interim report reiterated that children and young people must be valued in a process that holds their cultural rights as central to the child or young person’s identify and safety.
The ACT government is acting on the recommendations from the interim report as part of an ongoing commitment to reducing the over-representation of Aboriginal children in the statutory child protection system. I look forward to receiving the final
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