From journal articles to Quick Guides and webinars, you will find tools and information to support.
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The Pathways of Care Longitudinal Study (POCLS) is the first large-scale prospective longitudinal study of children and young people in out-of-home care (OOHC) in Australia. Information on safety, permanency and wellbeing will be collected from various sources. The child developmental domains of interest are physical health, socio-emotional wellbeing and cognitive/learning ability. This interactive webpage provides an overview of several elements of the study, including videos, methods and updates.
This summary report from Ass. Prof Stephanie Taplin and Dr Aino Suomi at Australian Catholic University covers the main findings of the kContact study. This study is the largest trial to date testing the effectiveness of a contact intervention (the kContact Pratice Model) in the out-of-home care context. The main component of the kContact Practice Model consisted of the key workers contacting parents before and after each contact visit to provide them with support. This support helped parents clarify their concerns and expectations about contact, and provided practical and emotional support for the next visit with the study child.
This resource highlights the key findings, recommendations and takeaways from this July 2020 report by the Brotherhood of St. Laurence. The report explores the inadequacies of existing service provisions for children and young people aged 10-16 years who do not qualify for statutory removal but who cannot remain at home due to family conflict.
This evaluation report examines the Power to Kids: Respecting Sexual Safety project at MacKillop Family Services. This project aimed to co-design, implement and evaluate strategies to prevent and intervene early in harmful sexual behaviour, child sexual exploitation and dating violence in residential care. The report concludes that primary prevention efforts are required that focus on respectful relationships and sexuality education, and secondary interventions should focus on reducing risk factors and enhancing protective factors. Further, tertiary prevention efforts need to involve assisting young people to exit exploitation and providing therapeutic responses for victims of sexual violence and for young people who carry out the violence.
This webinar from Child Family Community Australia (CFCA) explored the potential impact of COVID-19 on young care leavers, and strategies to strengthen their social and emotional wellbeing. It reflected on past CFCA presentations and current responses in considering what may help support young care leavers during this pandemic. Recognising the increased risks of social isolation and psychological stress, presenters discussed strategies to strengthen young people’s social capital and improve their social and emotional wellbeing.
This evidence to action note from the NSW Department of Communities and Justice summarises the findings of the NSW Child Development Study, which examined 17 risk factors to see if they could accurately predict whether a child would enter out-of-home care (OOHC) by the age of 13-14 years. The study identified six risk factors that can jointly classify children with an OOHC placement with 95% accuracy. This summary note discusses the implications of these findings for policy and practice.
This brief from the Centre for Excellence in Therapeutic Care discusses what is needed to create genuine participation for young people in residential care. It discusses why youth participation is important and beneficial for designing services, programs and policies in this setting. It also covers a number of different models for participation, and implications for practitioners and organisations in using these approaches.
This practice paper from AIFS focuses on improving cross-sectoral relationships between child protection and child and family welfare practitioners, who are often required to work together to keep children and families safe. This paper offers tips and techniques to build practitioners’ collaborative competence; that is, their skills in developing and sustaining effective cross-sectoral relationships in the many and varied circumstances of daily practice.
This article is part of a series of reports and articles seeking to understand the circumstances that lead to children and young people becoming ‘cross-over kids’; involved in both the child protection and criminal justice systems. It looks at cross-over children’s initial charges.
