Two innovative programs supporting children to be placed with their extended families and other families have received a funding boost from the Malinauskas Government.
The Finding Families and Additionally Approved Carers programs are going from strength-to-strength, with a further investment of $3.3m to continue their important work.
Through Finding Families, a team of social workers focuses solely on finding safe, nurturing and stable family-based placements with extended family, travelling to communities across the country to meet with children's relatives as part of that process.
Through the program, 115 children and young people, 39 of them Aboriginal, are now in stable placements with families. 81 of these children are aged 10 years or younger.
Following the success of the initial 12-month pilot, the Government has further invested in, and extended, the Finding Families program for another 12 months so it can be further evaluated, and we can continue to explore how we can best help keep children and young people connected to family and living in a family home.
The Additionally Approved Carers Program is also gathering steam and has provided 6090 nights of care for children and young people since January 2024 – up from about 4000 just four months ago.
Through the program, social workers identify kinship carers who are willing to take on another, unrelated, child or young person on an emergency, respite or short-term basis – in many cases, diverting them from entering residential care.
Workers initially focused on kinship carers who had capacity to take on another child due to the young people they cared for reaching adulthood or being reunified with their birth parents. More recently, its focus has broadened to a wider group of carers, who are also willing to offer more children a safe place to stay.
The Additionally Approved Carers program has helped form communities of carers supporting each other through respite, allowing each other to take a day, night, or weekend out for themselves – an important success in the Government's commitment to helping support and retain carers.
The $3.3m boost for the programs came via the State Budget, which also allocated an extra $2m over two years for six additional staff for the Child Abuse Report Line to respond to an increasing number of notifications about children's safety, and $14.9m for the KidSafe Connect digital transformation project.
As put by Katrine Hildyard
Children and young people dealing with really complex issues deserve for us to constantly explore and evaluate new ways to help them safely live in family environments.
This new investment allows dedicated staff to continue their efforts to find the best places for young people. When it comes to the protection of the children who most need us, we know there is more to do but this investment, and our ongoing reform, are, pleasingly, beginning to show promising results.
I am very grateful to the carers who open their homes and hearts and selflessly dedicate themselves to supporting young people and giving them opportunities to thrive now and into the future
