Page 2901 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 14 August 2019
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MRS JONES: Minister, what specific innovative approaches or improvements have you discovered that you will be building into how this government delivers residential care to vulnerable children and young people?
MS STEPHEN-SMITH: I thank Mrs Jones for her supplementary question. As members would be aware, last year I went on a study tour to England, Scotland and Ireland. One of the places that we visited there—Mrs Kikkert has talked about it before—was a specific purpose-built residential facility in Scotland that had up to six children and young people in a residential unit at any one time. This is not the way that we have been delivering residential care here in the ACT, where it tends to be a maximum of three, maybe four, but generally two or three young people together.
I think there are opportunities. I was recently in Melbourne visiting a specific therapeutic residential care home where again there were four young people in that home. I think we have an opportunity to consider some specific purpose-built residential facilities that would house more young people together, which has not been Premier Youthworks’ preferred model but which does provide the opportunity for staffing ratios that allow more staff to be in the home at any one time without actually increasing the staff-to-resident ratio.
In terms of the therapeutic partnerships that we visited in Melbourne with specialist therapeutic providers, we do, of course, already have the Australian Childhood Foundation as a partner in ACT Together here. But in terms of specialist therapeutic care including from university specialists and the provision of support from VACCA, the Victorian Aboriginal community controlled childcare organisation and the partnership that they have, obviously we do not have an Aboriginal community controlled childcare organisation here in the ACT yet. That is something that has obviously been a recommendation of the Our Booris, Our Way review.
There is a range of partnership models that we would consider and a range of specific support models that we could consider. One of the other ones that we visited in Victoria was specifically focused on supporting girls and young women who had experienced sexual exploitation which, sadly, is also something that we know exists in our community. That was a very specific service response for those girls and young women.
Those are the kinds of things we want to do. We want to draw on the expertise of the non-government sector and our academic partners in this space. We do not have any specific models in mind that we are committed to right now because we are still working through that.
MRS KIKKERT: Minister, what else are you proactively doing to make sure that the partnership model and the specific model that you just mentioned are going to be implemented in the child and youth protection service system?
MS STEPHEN-SMITH: I thank Mrs Kikkert for the supplementary. There is a lot of work going on within child and youth protection services and with Barnardos to understand what the opportunities are in terms of another provider coming into the
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