The Pathways of Care Longitudinal Study (POCLS) is the first large-scale prospective longitudinal study of children and young people in out-of-home care in Australia. It includes a cohort of all 4126 children and young people (age 0 to 17 years) who entered out-of-home care for the first time over an 18-month period from May 2010 to October 2011 in New South Wales, with a focus on 2828 of these children with final court orders.

Children as young as two are stuck living in state-run homes with paid carers despite a royal commission calling seven years ago for an end to the practice. Over the Christmas and New Year period there were hundreds of children living in these homes after being removed from unsafe families.

Children in families affected by substance use disorders are at high risk of being placed in out-of-home care (OOHC). The authors of this Australia-based study aimed to describe the characteristics of parents who inject drugs and identify correlates associated with child placement in OOHC.

A new national report in Australia has found Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are 10.5 times more likely to be in out-of-home care than non-Indigenous children, with its authors warning more must be done to turn the tide on current trends. 

Some children in out-of-home care in Tasmania were not regularly visited by safety officers after a shift to a case management policy which violated their rights, a peak advocate says.

There was a significant, but quiet, development in Queensland this month likely to have far-reaching implications beyond the two traumatic and personal stories of child removals and hidden family histories driving it. “Child protection class action launched alleging racial discrimination,” the headline of a post on the Cairns-based Bottoms English Lawyers website read two weeks ago.

Bethan Carter, a research associate at Cardiff University, discusses the ReThink Project; a project run in collaboration with Adoption UK and Coram Voice to investigate what processes are linked to mental health and wellbeing of care-experienced young people and how they manage at two key transitions in life.

This global systematic review incorporated a comprehensive search of available literature from 1990 and captures the extant literature relating to process evaluations for interventions which address care-experienced children and young people’s mental health and well-being, and is one of the first syntheses of process evaluations in social care.

Family Matters reports focus on what the Australian government is doing to turn the tide on over-representation and outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.

This article highlights the continuity of overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, and systemic racism, in the Australian child protection and out-of-home care systems over time.