Page 1334 - Week 04 - Thursday, 12 April 2018
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The majority of children and young people in residential care are aged 12 and above, with only one new entry during the reporting period of July to December.
The number of approved carers continues to increase, with 127 foster and kinship carers approved from July to December last year. Six carers left the system during this time. Eighty-three per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people in care have a cultural plan in place.
As members would be aware, A step up for our kids is a fundamental shift in the provision of services in the out of home care sector, and reforms of this scale take time to be fully realised. While there has already been evidence of positive improvements since the implementation of the strategy, further evidence of change will continue to emerge over the next 12 to 18 months as implementation continues and the newly established services are further embedded. As the service system matures and more data becomes available, further headline measures will be added to the snapshot report to provide a holistic view of how the out of home care system is performing.
The snapshot report measures the outputs of the out of home care system. However, A step up for our kids has been designed around the achievement of outcomes. The strategy specifies that evaluation will be undertaken at key points to measure whether the objectives and outcomes of the strategy are being met. Specifically, an evaluation will be undertaken midway through the term of the strategy and also at the end of the five-year term of the strategy in 2020.
The ACT government engaged the specialist services of KPMG to develop an outcomes-based evaluation framework, including indicators to measure strategy outcomes, conduct an initial baseline review to determine the suitability of measures and establish a performance benchmark, and perform a mid-strategy evaluation against the agreed outcomes.
I am pleased to inform the Assembly that KPMG delivered the baseline report in February this year. The report documents the progress of the implementation of the strategy as at June 2017 and is now available on the Community Services Directorate website. The baseline report uses the domains of the strategy that I mentioned earlier: a therapeutic trauma-informed care system; strengthening high risk families; creating a continuum of care; and strengthening accountability and ensuring a high functioning care system.
It is not intended to be an evaluation of the strategy. The intent of the report is to establish a working benchmark for the new services established under the strategy, to test and validate the outcome measures against which the mid-strategy evaluation will be assessed, and to ensure the correct information is being captured to enable effective analysis and determine the overall success of the strategy.
The report includes data for services that are newly established and some data that has never before been collected. As a result, a time series to enable detailed analysis and assessment against long-term outcomes is not yet available for these new measures. Due to the relatively small number of children in out of home care in the ACT and the
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