Page 1738 - Week 06 - Thursday, 3 June 2021
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achievement of kids in care. Researchers Ruth Knight and Sari Rossi, for example, found that kids in care do better with carers who are supportive of educational and extracurricular activities, especially when carers are able to consistently act as mentors or tutors to build the child’s cognitive and social skills.
As researchers Marion Coddou and Joseph Borlagdan have found, one key to education success is access to support and encouragement from at least one significant adult who can give young people in care good advice, focus on the opportunities open to them and help them to develop a perception of themselves as competent learners. Confident, capable youth workers can perform this role and/or support others who do. They likewise play a central role in creating home environments that are supportive of learning. As the Australian Childhood Foundation has noted in relation to residential care:
Whenever children or young people are asked … they say it is the staff who make the difference”.
Staff intuitively understand this fact, and those who have shared their experiences with me would be grateful to have additional support and training so that they can make a bigger difference.
I take this opportunity to note as well that research indicates that young people in the youth justice system have often experienced trouble at school, including issues with poor school attendance and performance. Like residential care youth workers, staff at Bimberi Youth Justice Centre also understand that they have an important role to play in supporting the educational attainment of the young people in their care. As a current online ad states:
Bimberi youth workers supervise every aspect of a young offender’s life during their time in custody … Bimberi youth workers are role models who encourage and motivate young people.
For these reasons, I have included youth justice workers in this motion. I also wish to note that the government’s out of home care strategy acknowledges many of the issues that I have raised and therefore contains a joint education and training pathways initiative intended to improve education outcomes. As noted in the KPMG evaluation of the strategy, this initiative includes encouraging attendance, notifying child protection staff of absenteeism, and making sure that each child has an individual learning plan. These are all good things. Youth workers have told me, for example, that they do get notified when young people are absent from school. The question remains whether this is enough. Youth workers who have shared their concerns with me emphatically state that it is not.
I emphasise here that this is not a problem unique to the ACT. Research from across Australia shows that kids in residential care are at particular risk of poor educational outcomes. As they are aware of the importance of education to life outcomes, all states and territories acknowledge that more needs to be done. As I have listened to youth workers, two needs became clear. First, as I have mentioned, there needs to be additional support and training for carers so that they can better support the learning of the kids and help create environments that support learning. Second, there should
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