This article describes one agency’s strategies in developing benchmarks for best practice outcomes in fostering. Workers have used current literature, research and reports to identify optimum outcomes, and have then compared the performance of their own foster care program to these points. Future directions and current needs in research in this area are identified.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle has been the policy guiding the placement of indigenous children in most Australian child protection jurisdictions for around fifteen years. The Principle requires the involvement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community representatives in decision making concerning indigenous children, and ensuring that alternative care placements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander careproviders.

Most Jurisdictions still have a significant number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children placed with non-indigenous careproviders, and community based Aboriginal and Islander child care agencies continue to express dissatisfaction about the nature and level of consultation which occurs when welfare departments are taking action to protect indigenous children.

This paper, which was presented at the IFCO conference in Melbourne in July 1999, examines why there has been such limited improvement in Child Placement Principle outcomes. Work undertaken in Queensland to address the over representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in the child protection system will be outlined from both a departmental and community perspective. The paper argues that if strategies for addressing these issues are not located within a framework of self determination for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, then they will not work.

My first duty is to acknowledge and pay my respects to the traditional owners of this part of the country, the Kulin Nation; it’s a privilege and a great pleasure to make this presentation on your ancestral lands.

In the Submission to the National Inquiry of the Aboriginal Legal Services, Western Australia, they said that the, and I quote:

This paper is based on an address given at the Oz Child Annual General Meeting on 7 December 1998 in Dandenong, Victoria.

Discourses about child abuse are usually adult centred. In the research described in this paper young people were asked to give their perspectives on abuse. They described abusive behaviour as that perpetrated by persons who use their power to control those they consider as lesser.

The young people described two forms of abuse. One was feeling let down by those with whom they are in an emotional relationship. The other was feeling discounted because of their age. The children and young people considered the right to negotiate or to have ‘two-way compromise’ as essential to the prevention of abuse. The power to disclose or not to disclose abuse was described as an important issue for children in enabling them to maintain some control over their situation.

The research process and findings highlighted the way in which the institutionalisation of adult power over children as legitimate, excludes children’s knowledge on issues concerning them by preventing their participation in knowledge creating forums, and by discounting their competency as children to contribute.

This article offers a brief notation on the First International Conference on Child Access Services, held in Paris on 4–7 November 1998. The author raises some questions which took shape at the Conference and notes the contrasting representations in different countries of the disciplines involved in establishing and running Child Contact Centres and how these may contribute to the contrast in ideology and philosophy in the setting up and running of these centres and the services they offer. The author’s knowledge of the French contact centre models provides a basis for looking at the establishment of Australian centres, both government and non-government funded. The French centres’ paramount goal to develop respect for the child as a person and uphold his legal position by equipping him with a sense of his history and roots, and by fostering respect between the parents, is seen as a more comprehensible concept than the ambiguous ‘best interest of the child’ goal upheld in Anglo-Saxon countries. Moreover, the length of involvement with families in the French centres is contrasted with the shorter period needed to secure the child’s physical safety. The article concludes with the hope that Australian centres are at the threshold of developing an adjunct facilitative structure that would allow progress within the families referred to them and offers as a parting note some recent American research findings on the profile of families using visitation services and of the providers of such services.

Prevention approaches are an important response to the problem of child abuse. Although there have been repeated calls for closer parent-teacher cooperation in prevention programs, such alliances have been far from satisfactory to date. Reasons for poor parent-teacher partnerships are based on social reluctance to intervene in the family unit and the mutual reluctance of teachers and parents to engage in a meaningful alliance. Part of the reticence of teachers to involve parents lies in their lack of confidence relating to the delivery of the child protection curriculum. These problems are explored and some suggestions for change are offered.

For the last twenty-five years, in Australia and in most western type countries, the planning of services for children and families has been strongly influenced by a series of ideological concepts. These concepts are: deinstitutionalization, normalization, least restrictive environment, mainstreaming, minimal intervention, and diversion. Together they are the central tenets of a paradigm (CTP) currently used by policy makers and human service planners. This paper argues that the use of the CTP has had an unintended negative impact. It has lead to the neglect of the most difficult ‘at risk’ adolescents and their families. What we have is a situation where services of sufficient power, intensity and duration (PID) needed by this group are not favoured since they do not conform to the CTP. For ‘at risk’ adolescents and their families this is socially unjust.

In response to concerns within the Children’s Welfare Association of Victoria (CWAV) about the difficulty of recruiting foster parents, a study of the recruitment process experienced by Victorian inquirers was conducted. The literature consistently reports a low rate of conversion of inquirers into foster carers. This study was concerned with finding out the cause of this low rate, what happens to the inquirers after making a call and why they decide to continue or not continue with foster care?

Telephone interviews were conducted with 91 inquirers about their experience of the recruitment process. Only 4 per cent of these inquirers had become carers. The rest were split evenly between those who decided not to continue because of personal circumstances, and those who were discouraged in some way by the response to their contact received from the allocated agency. This result was surprising and disappointing, and we suggest that these callers may be a more valuable resource than agencies suspect. Ways of giving these callers more effective follow up, while recognising constraints on time and resources experienced by workers in this field, are needed to take full advantage of the opportunity to recruit the potential carers among them.

It is always a bit of a relief to have some guidance and a direction when you are asked to give a keynote or a plenary address. I was asked once to give a commencement address at a university … to be but one of a few such speeches that day. After accepting the honor, I asked the dean, who had nominated me, ‘What should I talk about?’ He replied, ‘Talk about five minutes … and be seated.’ I did. Today, will talk but a bit longer, and hope that afterwards few of you will say, ‘I thought that man would never sit down.’

I also want to tell you what a pleasure it is to talk with an audience that is here because they want to be here … here by choice. The direction that I want to take us in thisbrief time is a look at how we can involve ourselves with children in care, with the overarching goal of reversing some of the negative impacts on their lives that have come along with them and into our foster homes.

In recent times, research that has traditionally concerned itself with children ‘at risk’ has been supplemented by studies which have concentrated on the characteristics of those children who display resilient behaviours despite the presence of negative individual, family or environmental factors. A range of internal and external ‘protective factors’ that contribute to childhood resilience has been identified in the literature.

The research being presented here reports on one phase of a longitudinal study that is tracking children originally identified as displaying resilient or non-resilient behaviour. After one year, the persistence of resilient or non-resilient behaviours is noted among the 55 children in the study; the incidence of changed behaviour – either from resilience to non-resilience or vice versa – is low. Case studies of three children are used to illustrate the trends in the findings and to provide real examples of how the presence or absence of protective factors impact on the lives of real children.

This article, the final in a series of three, looks at how and why children are referred for psychiatric help, and then presents an analysis of referrals which occurred during the period, 1.7.1991–30.6.1993, at Alfred Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service in Melbourne.

Analysis of the referral sources for two groups of children (those who had experienced non-biological care and those who had not) showed very different patterns, the implications of which are discussed. In contrast, analysis of the presenting problems showed that the difference between the two groups of children was not as marked as had been expected. Possible explanations for this, involving systemic issues, are explored.

This paper was commissioned for this issue of Children Australia to draw together developmental issues for children and young people in care.

MacKillop Family Services was established in July 1997 as a refounding of seven well-established child, youth and family agencies in Melbourne and Geelong. The pressures for change came from the desires of the directors of these agencies and the leaders of their auspicing religious congregations to continue and to improve their services and, at the same time, from the demands of government tendering and funding polices. Several elements contributed to the success of the process of negotiating change: all parties were treated equally; the directors of the agencies were unwavering in their commitment to change; there was a shared sense of urgent social needs and of the opportunity to improve and stabilise responses to those needs; the traditions of each agency were accorded understanding and respect; time and money were made available for much discussion and careful planning; and, finally, a realistic time-frame for transition was provided.

This paper provides an introduction and background to the Family Decision Making project which was piloted in the Department of Community Services Cumberland/Prospect area of NSW, in partnership with Burnside (an agency of the Uniting Church NSW). The paper outlines the core features and values of the DoCS/Burnside project with the aim of promoting discussion as to Family Decision Making’s wider application as a best practice model of working with children and families.