Welcome to the first issue of Children Australia for 2017. This year we hope to continue to bring you a range of content to do with children and young people's health, care and wellbeing. This issue covers a variety of topics, and the next will be a themed issue based on presentations given at the 2016 Australian Childhood Foundation conference on trauma. As always, we welcome and encourage submissions from both new and seasoned researchers, as well as those of you working in the field who may like to share your thoughts and innovations in a practice commentary. While on the topic of working in the field, I thought I would take a moment to consider the ways that space or the built environment can impact upon children when engaging with services.

It is not uncommon to hear foster carers and child protection case workers comment about a child's behaviour both before and after parental contact. Frequently these comments are negative, the view being expressed that contact should be reduced because the children get upset at seeing their parents for a limited time, and then at having to separate from them. The child's resultant distress seems too difficult to manage for foster carers. Some foster parents even go so far as to suggest that parental contact should completely cease. This article sets out the rationale for parent–child contact after a Children's Court has ruled that there is “no realistic possibility of restoration” of a child to parental care. In doing so, the article revisits many of the old arguments put forward for reducing parent contact. However, alternative ways of approaching children's difficult behaviours both pre- and post-contact are also proposed to suggest different ways of managing these behaviours. The legislation and child protection practice in New South Wales provides the frame of reference for this article.

The paper reflects on developments in leaving care policy and practice in Western Australia (WA) and nationally from the mid-1990s. The review of national and some international literature suggests that current Australian policy and practice shows a ‘systems stuckness’ that requires a more potent form of annual auditing and reporting of jurisdictional leaving care outcomes. The review of mostly Australian publications focusing on leaving care and the risk of homelessness includes reflections on recent developments in leaving care services in England, which recognise and restore relationship-based services for care leavers. Finally, the history, vision and initial impact of the Living Independently for the First Time (LIFT) Project, a case study of learning by doing, is outlined. The authors and their colleagues from the Department for Child Protection and Family Support (Midland District), Swan Emergency Accommodation (now known as Indigo Junction) and the Housing Authority of WA have collaborated to design and develop the LIFT Project. This initially unfunded action-research strategy involves inter-agency policy and practice designed to prevent homelessness of vulnerable care leavers.

This paper describes a critical interpretive synthesis (critical review of the literature) exploring the ways children are described and represented in the homelessness and family violence literature regarding programmes. Authors' descriptions of children and their perceived needs are considered from individual, interpersonal and systemic positions, with an inherent focus on the influence of academic language and power in representing children. The articles reviewed here contained an abundance of negative descriptions of children's poor health, educational and developmental outcomes, but very little acknowledgement of children's personal resources and capacities in times of adversity. The programme goals and strengths-based therapeutic intentions described by the authors of these articles were not always congruent with the ways children were being represented in the early stages of the articles. We argue for a better balance in representing children's strengths alongside their challenges when describing their presentation and participation in programmes and research.

Across the developed world, efforts are being made to identify and develop effective interventions that will reduce the prevalence and severity of mental health problems among children and young people in out-of-home care. Foster and kinship carers have been identified as critically important in this process. In order to develop an understanding of what interventions and/or supports assist carers in responding effectively to the mental health needs of the children and young people in their care, a scoping review was undertaken. Using the scoping study method, 1064 publications were identified, and 82 publications were selected for further analysis. The review shows that promising interventions that aim to improve the mental health of children and young people living in out-of-home care have been developed and trialled both in Australia and internationally. However, the review also highlights the lack of research specifically focused on the role of the carer.

Across the eight jurisdictions of Australia, mandatory reporting obligations and thresholds for reporting vary. Teachers are one group of the professionals who are mandated to report child maltreatment, yet some teachers are still reluctant to make such a report. This paper examines the barriers that discourage teachers from reporting child maltreatment and also whether teachers consider it necessary to question a child about the maltreatment before they decide if a report should be made. Thirty semi-structured interviews with Victorian primary school teachers were thematically analysed and revealed that inadequate and inconsistent mandatory reporting training, the need for certainty before initiating a report and the ambiguous concept of neglect were barriers to teachers identifying and reporting child maltreatment. Analyses further revealed that teachers gather evidence to confirm or disconfirm their suspicions of maltreatment by questioning the suspected child victim. The consequences of this practice are discussed along with recommendations to help overcome the barriers to making a formal report when child maltreatment is suspected.

In this article, the findings of research that had, as one aim, the exploration of the role of decision-making tools and practice frameworks in supporting the decision making of practitioners working with children and families in non-government agencies in Queensland are presented. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 frontline practitioners in three agencies in five different locations. A general finding was that practitioners used a range of different tools and frameworks and found them supportive. The pertinence of these findings is discussed in relation to recent developments in the provision of services for children and families in Queensland, namely the new funding of non-government agencies to provide early intervention supportive services to children and families and the implementation of a single practice framework to guide practice across the sector. Areas for future research in Queensland are identified to further investigate the role of tools in frontline practice with children and families and which may also contribute to debates more broadly about the development and implementation of practice frameworks to support practitioners.

Parental deployment to a war zone brings many changes to family life. Changes in family roles and routines unsettle children and interfere with their educational engagement. Defence School Transition Aides (DSTAs) are employed in qualifying Australian schools to assist students from Australian Defence Force (ADF) families to manage transitions associated with a parental deployment to a war zone. Reported here are findings from a study that explored parents’, teachers’ and DSTAs’ perspectives of school-based support designed to assist students to cope with their changed circumstances when a parent is deployed. Results indicate that an appreciation of students’ worries by school personnel eased their distress. DSTAs facilitated processes whereby peers with deployed parents supported each other. Alerting teachers to an intended deployment was also found to be important as it allowed them to be alert to student behaviour changes and prepare ahead for possible student support needs. DSTAs reminded parents through school newsletters to pass on pertinent deployment-related information to the school so that a coordinated school–family approach for supporting students could be enacted. Further research is required to investigate the educational significance of student support offered by culturally aware key adults and student peers during major life transitions.

Literature on children's internal body knowledge has consistently indicated that knowledge about the body develops in an orderly sequence with increasing age. How much children currently know about their internal organs, however, may be influenced by the increase in health and body information available through school education programmes. As there is little recent research in this area, the present study aimed to provide an update on what Australian children currently understand about their anatomy, and to corroborate the developmental trends found in previous research. One hundred and eighty-nine school children aged 7 to 12 years were asked to draw the interior of the body in a body outline provided, with a subset of 54 children also being interviewed about their understanding of their anatomy. The developmental trends found in this study were broadly consistent with those reported in the existing literature on children's inside body knowledge, and are similar to those documented with children's human figure drawing; namely, that children's body knowledge and understanding increased with age. Although awareness of the integration of internal body parts amongst children in the present study seemed more developed than suggested in previous studies, the availability of educational resources influencing children's knowledge about their internal organs remains equivocal. Nevertheless, this research has relevance for those involved in children's health awareness and education, as well as direct implications for paediatric health care procedures.