No doubt the mid-year will see academic staff scurrying to complete Semester 1 teaching and marking, and those of you working in the field will be well into the swing of the year and facing a variety of funding issues as the new financial year emerges. The last few years have been difficult in terms of funding for health and community service programmes and, while the focus has been on enquiries into child abuse, mental health assessment of young children, the acute lack of affordable housing and pressures on single parents raising children, the Australian atmosphere, in general, is one of restraint and pulling back from funding of welfare services. This comes at a time when Australia has enjoyed much better financial well-being than many other countries in the world and, ironically, there appears to have been a drop in what the Government refers to as welfare dependency. However, as the population is continuing to increase and we are continuing to experience the economic losses associated with severe weather events and climate change, it seems we are also, as a nation, less inclined to be generous to those who experience ongoing disadvantage. The gap, according to Nicholas Biddle and Maxine Montaigne (2012) of the Australian National University, is not as great as that in the USA ‒ hardly something we would want to emulate‒ but is still increasing. While on average Australians have experienced an increase in income since the 2006 Census, this is not evenly distributed between states, regions and suburbs. We know that loss of a stable and sufficient income, as in the event of loss of employment, has major impacts on the well-being of family members and this was the message reiterated at the ‘Securing the Future’ Conference held last November. Clearly, we have a long way to go before our services will be able to truly address structural disadvantage.

The New South Wales Children's Court, like other state and territory Children's Courts, is a closed court. This means that the public cannot attend court hearings when care and protection matters are before the court. The exception is Victoria where even in the Family Division of the Children's Court that deals with care and protection matters an application has to be made to a magistrate for the court to be closed. This article is designed to take the reader behind the closed door and provide information about court processes and procedures as well as present parents' comments on the way in which the court works.

In New South Wales there are seven specialist children's courts at Parramatta, Glebe (Bidura), Campbeltown, Newcastle (Broadmeadow), Wyong, Woy Woy and in the Illawarra (Port Kembla). In other places children's care matters are dealt with by local magistrates supported by specialist Children's Court magistrates from Parramatta who staff a country Children's Court circuit.

Parents' views on these processes and procedures are troubling as many see the court as unfair in the way that decisions are made. The parents' views have been obtained, through interviews with parents over a number of years, as part of the authors' professional duties, as a Guardian ad Litem and solicitor in the New South Wales Children's Court.

From this experience it is clear that many professional staff who have contact with parents involved in Children's Court matters are also unclear about the court processes, and as a result they are less able to support parents through this stressful process. This article aims to assist staff to understand the court processes so that they may in turn support parents.

The Pyjama Foundation is an Australian charity working to improve the literacy and numeracy outcomes for children in foster care. The foundation delivers the Pyjama Foundation Love of Learning programme, a learning-based mentoring programme in which volunteer ‘Pyjama Angels’ visit children in care each week to read books, play games and engage in other learning-based activities.

This study surveyed 121 Love of Learning mentors (‘Pyjama Angels’) to assess their perceptions of the relationships they had developed with the children they mentored and of the children's improvement in their literacy skills, a key aim of the programme.

The statistical data analysis based on the structural equation modelling and multiple regression approach showed that several factors had a statistically significant impact on the mentors’ perceptions of the children's improvement in literacy skills: relationship with the child, child's engagement and tenure in the programme, and frequency of meetings. Age and gender of the mentors were not found to have a statistically significant impact on mentors’ perceptions of this improvement, while mentors’ perceptions of their relationship with the children was the most important factor influencing their perceptions of improvement in literacy skills. The study did not include objective measures of the children's literacy outcomes, so its results are limited to the mentors’ perceptions. However, this study offers valuable insights for mentoring programmes working with children living in foster care.

This paper describes the collaboration between an Aboriginal community and Western Australia's (WA) Department for Child Protection (DCP) in designing and operating a residential child care facility in a predominantly Aboriginal community. Research literature has established that the effective operation of child protection systems in remote Aboriginal communities requires practitioners and policy-makers to have awareness of local and extra-local cultural, historical and contemporary social factors in nurturing children. This ethnographic case study describes how a newspaper campaign heightened public and professional awareness of child abuse in the town of Halls Creek, in WA's Kimberley region. With its largely Aboriginal population, Halls Creek lacked the infrastructure to accommodate an inflow of regional people. Homelessness, neglect and poverty were widespread. Within a broader government and local response, DCP joined with community leaders to plan out of home care for children. Detailed are the importance and complexities of negotiating between universal standardised models of care and local input. Strategies for building positive relationships with children's family while strengthening both parenting capacity and community acceptance, and use of the facility are identified. Key to success was the development of a collaborative ‘third-space’ for threading together local and professional child protection knowledge.

The focus of this article is young women aged 16–17 years who, while in State care in New South Wales gave birth, and from whom the child was then removed by the same department that is responsible for the mother's care. This topic is rarely examined due to two constraints. One is the lack of available data about the incidence of events of this kind. The second is the confidentiality provision in the New South Wales Children and Young Persons (Care and Protection) Act 1998 which defines the Children's Court as a closed court and prohibits the reporting of identifiable case information.

As a consequence much of this article is based on the authors' direct observation of cases involving young women of this age that they have encountered while undertaking professional duties in the Children's Court. The article also explores the further issue of the adoption of children removed from mothers who are still in State care.

Because of the lack of data this article can be classified as an opinion piece which attempts to raise awareness about an important care issue. The article has a New South Wales focus but the authors expect that the same concerns are echoed in other Australian states and territories.

Child labour is a phrase associated with exploitation, poverty, insufficient education and various forms of physical abuse. These connotations do not match Australian perceptions about the employment of children and are not correlated with mainstream dialogue on teenagers in part time and casual employment. Child employment is an accepted part of Australian society, with older children making up a significant portion of the workforce. Minimum standards are increasingly regarded a critical safeguard for young Australians at work, evidenced by recent state level statutory amendment and enactment of dedicated legislation. This article makes two submissions; first, it suggests the regulation of young people's working conditions is inappropriately neglected at national level in Australia, and secondly, it proposes national standards should be set and equated with those in other developed economies, meeting international standards. The 1994 European Community Directive on the Protection of Young Workers is referred to as a suitable benchmark.