Page 1811 - Week 05 - Thursday, 2 April 2009
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We have to help vulnerable children, and we have to help young people help themselves. How? First, we have invested in immediate needs. For example, we have undertaken to invest $800,000 to support grandparents who provide care to children and young people. A further $120,000 has been allocated for the development of support and services for Indigenous grandparents. We have made $800,000 available to UnitingCare Kippax to provide early intervention, prevention and family support services for local families. We are committed to the establishment of two childcare centres in areas of high demand in the ACT.
Then we have paid particular attention to Indigenous children and young people. As members are aware, there is an over-representation of Indigenous children and young people in the child protection and youth justice system. To assist in addressing this, we are expanding the integrated service delivery to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, providing a total of more that $2.4 million over four years.
We do our best for children with the most complex needs. The Office of Children, Youth and Family Support works in partnership with many community agencies, including the youth supported accommodation assistance program, Richmond Fellowship, Barnardos and Marymead. Together we do our best to manage actively and respond appropriately to young people with high and complex needs. For example, young people are placed with these organisations, which allows appropriate services to work intensively with young people over time. When it works, this can achieve real and sustainable change for the better in the behaviour of these young people.
The office is developing an out-of-home care framework to give better guidance to the professionals doing this difficult job. The framework will pay particular attention to what is known as therapeutic foster care. We are planning a pilot of therapeutic foster care. This is designed to meet the needs of a small number of children and young people with very high, complex needs—young people who will benefit from intensive treatment.
The framework will canvas other innovative options. These include a therapeutic outreach service and a dedicated facility providing short-term secure accommodation for one or two young people with significant complex needs. I look forward to announcing more details of our plans for out-of-home care following the budget.
We are driving reforms, especially by integrating services. And in this tough policy area it is too easy to be discouraged. So let me share with the Assembly a real success story, the integrated family support project. This project has been supporting 13 families who were known to be, or were at risk of, entering the statutory child protection system. I would like to tell you about one of these families.
This family is made up of a mother with three children under the age of eight years. Care and protection services had received five child protection reports in the two months prior to the family entering the project. Since this family came into the project, the government and community agencies have worked together to help this family stay together whilst making sure the kids are safe. The mother has had a lot of help to improve her ability to meet the children’s needs, and for 10 months now not a single child protection report has been received about this family.
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