Drawing from the learning from participatory research in Latin America and the Caribbean as well as Australia, this webinar introduced different approaches used to engage individuals with lived experience of alternative care in research efforts.

Drawing from the learning from participatory research in Latin America and the Caribbean as well as Australia, this webinar will introduce different approaches used to engage individuals with lived experience of alternative care in research efforts and highlight some of the key findings and lessons for meaningful and effective engagement.

In this paper, the authors report on a qualitative study conducted in Australia exploring practitioners' perceptions of barriers to contact between children in out-of-home care and their birth parents.

One of Australia’s leading Indigenous child welfare advocates has told a Victorian truth-telling inquiry that permanent care orders and “racist” carers are severing links between some First Nations children and their culture.

Child protection workers within the former Department of Health and Human Services were racist and disparaging towards the Aboriginal families and community-controlled organisation they were supposed to be working with to keep children safe, the Yoorrook Justice Commission has heard.

This study aims to provide evidence and instruction to social work educators, policymakers and practitioners
in Australia’s child protection, wellbeing, and justice systems about why and how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander controlled organizations are best placed to lead out-of-home care service delivery for Indigenous children, their family and community.

Queensland child safety authorities have quietly ditched a "racially biased" decision-making tool that had been widely used for years. The move came on the back of preliminary findings from a Queensland expert comparing the tool's accuracy across Indigenous and non-Indigenous children. The tool, known as the Structured Decision Making model, was used to rate children on their risk of harm and help authorities decide whether to intervene.

The latest Family Matters report released by the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care, an Australian non-governmental peak body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children – reveals that there are there more than 22,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care.

In 2020, an agreement between the Australian federal government, the Coalition of Peaks, all state and territory governments and the Australian Local Government Association (ALGA) was struck, aiming to renew ways of working together to improve outcomes for Indigenous Australians. This report is the first since the national agreement on Closing the Gap took effect and shows many of the targets are not on track.

The state government has ordered an immediate review of out-of-home care services for children in NSW, following claims two boys were left hungry and too cold to go to school this year while their care provider sought thousands of dollars a day to look after them.