Page 3065 - Week 08 - Thursday, 15 August 2019
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As those in this place would be aware, the strategy aims to work with families through prevention and reunification services and to improve outcomes for children and young people in care through permanent stable placements when they are not able to remain with or return to their birth family.
The investments in this year’s budget will ensure that we are funding our community partner, ACT Together, for the number of children and young people in care, and at a sustainable price, reflecting an increase in the flat fee paid to Barnardos as the ACT Together consortium leader. This further investment follows a mid-term contract review. The review was built into the contract precisely because we are doing something unique in contracting for the continuum of care, including foster care, kinship care, residential care, case management and therapeutic supports, all within one contract.
I will take the opportunity, as it has been a topic of conversation this week, to respond to some of the things that Mrs Kikkert noted in relation to the mid-strategy evaluation report for A step up for our kids. As I noted when I tabled the report, the mid-strategy evaluation contains data which is current to June 2018. The most recent snapshot report, which includes operational data up to 31 March 2019, is indeed showing some promising signs. While service demand for out of home care or for child protection continues to grow, the latest snapshot report has identified that this is at a lower rate in 2018-19 than in previous years, and I recognise that Mrs Kikkert acknowledged this.
From July 2018 to March 2019, 90 children and young people entered the out of home care system. This is 21 fewer than in the same period for the previous year. There has also been an increase in the stability of placements since the baseline report. To briefly respond to Mrs Kikkert’s comments in relation to the fact that while entries have gone down exits have also gone down: as I have previously noted in this place, it is a specific intention of the step-up strategy to ensure that, where children and young people are unable to live safely with their birth families or be restored to their birth families safely, they have a stable placement as soon as possible. That is specifically to address the challenge that child protection systems have had historically of children being restored unsuccessfully to their birth families multiple times, re-traumatising those children. So stability and permanency are an important part of the step-up strategy where young people cannot live safely with their birth families.
I also want to note some other points in relation to more recent achievements. The number of children aged under 11 being placed in residential care has continued to decrease since the implementation of the strategy, and no children aged under 11 were placed into residential care during 2017-18.
There has been some discussion this week in relation to health passports, and I advised the Assembly yesterday or the day before that I was seeking some further information in relation to that. I can provide the following information to the Assembly, as I know that Mrs Kikkert touched on it in her contribution as well. The mid-strategy evaluation showed that, in 2017-18, 94 per cent of children who entered care had an initial health check completed, where required, within six weeks of entering care. The number of children and young people aged from zero to 17 who
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