Page 1133 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 2 April 2019
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make a lifetime of difference, the out of home care strategy 2015-20. I am pleased to now present the third progress report.
As members are aware, the out of home care strategy aims to improve outcomes for children and young people in the care of the Director-General of the Community Services Directorate by providing more flexible, child-focused services and reducing demand for out of home care places.
The snapshot report is one of a range of reporting and evaluation mechanisms the Community Services Directorate uses to facilitate ongoing implementation and monitoring of the strategy. The report provides point-in-time data on service demand, the performance of the out of home care system and comparisons between reporting periods from July 2016 to December 2018.
The last report presented to the Assembly was the first opportunity to view the 2016-17 and 2017-18 data side by side. The addition of the first two quarters of 2018-19 in this report helps us to identify where there are trends that should be responded to or whether we are seeing temporary fluctuations in service demand. Shortly, I will talk to some of the trends that have emerged since the implementation of the strategy.
To provide a more holistic view of how the out of home care services system is performing, the Community Services Directorate will continue to increase the number of headline measures as the service system matures and more data becomes available. The current headline measures include the number of children and young people entering care in that quarter; the number of children and young people exiting care; a comparison of the number of children being case managed by ACT Together and child and youth protection services to monitor service capacity, indicating the number of children on short-term orders versus long-term orders; the types of placements children are in at that time and the number of children in each placement type; the number of enduring parental responsibility orders and adoptions completed; and the number of newly approved carers and number of carers exiting.
As I have said previously, reform of this nature takes time. A step up for our kids aims to create generational change, to break cycles of intergenerational harm and improve long-term outcomes for families, children and young people. This snapshot report highlights the following: service demand continues to increase but at a lower rate in 2018-19 than in 2016-17 and 2017-18. From July 2018 to December 2018, 53 children and young people entered the out of home care system. This was 30 fewer than in the same period the previous year—a 36 per cent reduction.
As reported in the two previous updates, this reduction in demand is also reflected in the lower number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people entering care compared to the previous reporting periods. Promisingly, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people represented 17 per cent of those entering care in the first half of 2018-19, compared with 35 per cent in the equivalent period in 2017-18. We are talking about small numbers over a limited period of time, so it is appropriate to be cautious, but this is certainly a hopeful sign.
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