Page 1333 - Week 04 - Thursday, 12 April 2018
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therapeutic services that can scale up and down in intensity as the child or young person’s needs change over time.
The strategy organises reform activity into three domains, all of which are underpinned by a commitment to a therapeutic, trauma-informed care system. These domains are: strengthening high risk families—increasing investment at the front end to divert children from entering long-term care; creating a continuum of care—a more collaborative system in which support services respond to the individual needs of children and young people who cannot live safely with their birth families; and strengthening accountability and ensuring a high functioning care system—creating a system that operates safely, effectively, efficiently, equitably and sustainably.
The snapshot report provides CSD with quarterly data on service demand and the performance of the out of home care system and compares this with the same period last year. The snapshot report provides point-in-time data on the following headline measures: 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—CYPS—to monitor service capacity and to indicate the number of children on short-term orders versus long-term orders; the types of placements children and young people are in at that time and the number of children in each placement type; the number of enduring parental responsibility orders and adoptions completed; the number of utilised carer households; and the number of newly approved carers and number of carers exiting.
Importantly, most data collected includes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander specific information, as we work to reduce over-representation.
Future reports will include the number of families engaging in restoration and prevention programs by type of program. This is an important element of A step up for our kids, and I am pleased to report that the number of families being supported by these services continues to increase. However, due to their relatively recent establishment, robust data was not available for this snapshot report.
This report provides an indication of the service demand and the capacity of the system to respond to this demand, in addition to throughput data. Fluctuations in data can then be examined to determine whether these represent trends that should be responded to or are temporary fluctuations in service demand.
This snapshot report highlights the following matters. Service demand continues to increase but at a slower rate than last year. Between July and December last year, 83 children and young people entered the out of home care system. This is 28 fewer than at the same time in the previous year. 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 same time last year.
The majority of children and young people in out of home care, 69 per cent, are on long-term orders, with more than half of those in care currently with kinship carers.
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