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.

This volume covers a broad spectrum of current research findings concerning the participation of young people in foster families and residential living groups in Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland as well as cross-nationals perspective on children and young people’s participation in foster and residential care placements in Great Britain and France.

This public event, presented by the Centre for Social Work Innovation and Research (CSWIR) at the University of Sussex in the UK and the Social Work Innovation Research Living Space (SWIRLS) at Flinders University in South Australia, will be an ‘in conversation with’ style event, where academics, and practitioners will discuss how practice has adapted to the heightened sense of uncertainty engendered by the pandemic in everyday child protection social work. The unique perspectives of social work practitioners and managers from Australian and UK practice contexts will be brought together in conversation with academic colleagues from SWIRLS and CSWIR.

This book examines the involvement of those with care experience in the criminal justice system in an Australian jurisdiction. The majority of children in care do not come into contact with the youth justice system. However, among children involved in the youth justice system, those with care experience are overrepresented. The authors focus on the process of colonialisation and criminalisation, rather than crime.