Page 1743 - Week 06 - Thursday, 3 June 2021
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For children and young people more broadly in out of home care, support networks include their families, their carers, their case managers, and others who make up the children’s care team. Educational decisions take into consideration the views and wishes of the child as well within the decision-making in that care team. I am interested that Mrs Kikkert’s motion does not go more broadly to children and young people in out of home care because the Anglicare TEACHaR program is a broader program targeting not only vulnerable children and young people in foster care but also those disengaging from education who are not necessarily in care now.
Children and young people in residential care are case managed in partnership between Child and Youth Protection Services and ACT Together, and case managers work closely with each child or young person’s care team to ensure that services and professionals, including educators, are involved in supporting all elements of a child or young person’s life.
Where a child or young person needs additional education support, Child and Youth Protection Services will explore tutoring options in their case planning and services will be engaged. That may include, for example, through the Barnardos tutoring program for vulnerable children and young people aged six to 16 years or the Migrant and Refugee Settlement Service, which delivers an after school study program for students aged eight to 25 years old who are from non-English-speaking backgrounds.
I also note the work already underway towards the design of the next iteration of the government’s Step Up for Our Kids out of home care strategy. I have talked about this before. This work is looking at continuous improvements that we have made to the system under the first Step Up strategy and how we can build on those to further strengthen the system and improve the experiences of young people. Part of this work includes the exploration of how we can collaborate with our community partners, their staff, and the unions that represent them, to continue to support the development of the workforce that supports some of the most vulnerable and at-risk children and young people in Canberra.
I look forward to coming back to the Assembly later this year to report back on how these matters raised in the motion can inform this ongoing work. I look forward to providing initial reflections on Anglicare’s TEACHaR program and how it compares with those that already exist in the ACT and it can potentially be incorporated into the future out of home care system.
In that context, I note Mrs Kikkert’s tendency to constantly go to services that are available in other jurisdictions and pick them out and say we should be doing this and we should be doing this and we should be doing this and very rarely talking about the good services that exist in the ACT that are sometimes unique to the ACT and where we, in fact, lead the nation.
The TEACHaR program has an evidence base. It clearly has made a difference in the lives of children and young people in Victoria. Again, I thank Mrs Kikkert for bringing this motion to the Assembly. It is important to recognise, again going to the amendment I have moved, that this is a broad program of support. It is not just about
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