Child Abuse Reports

Ms SANDERSON (Adelaide) (14:47): My question is to the Minister for Education and Child Development. Can the minister inform the house what KPIs and/or determinants will be used to evaluate the success of the proposed eight new non-social workers to be employed to work on the Child Abuse Report Line and what impact the minister expects this will have on the 15,000 calls that went unanswered last financial year?

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Minister for Education and Child Development, Minister for Higher Education and Skills) (14:47): The member is quite right to draw attention to the number of calls that go unanswered. I would like to contextualise that slightly in that we are seeing an increasing number of the combination of answered calls and eCARL, which are the emails that are sent into the electronic version of the CARL.

We are getting in absolute terms an increase in the number of contacts from members of the public, often mandated notifiers, into Families SA to inform us about concerns about children. In that context, there is a large number of calls that go unanswered, and it is simply impossible to know how many of those are repeats and how many of those end up being answered. Given that most of our contact is from mandatory notifiers, my belief is that the vast majority of them, if not all of them, are ultimately answered.

Nonetheless, it is not satisfactory to have people who are concerned about a child and are busy people in their own right hanging on a phone for what is literally, at times, hours on end, waiting to get through. I had a Facebook conversation with someone in that situation the other day. She is a member of the public who is a foster carer who got in touch with me to talk about how long it was taking her, and good on her for hanging in there to notify.

To deal with this issue of the escalating numbers—and, as members are well aware because I have raised it several times previously, we are carrying an unacceptable number of vacancies in Families SA which means that our staffing is depleted—we conceived the idea to have some workers who were not trained social workers but could simply answer the phone and do the first level of assessment of the call.

Members will be aware, and I am not sure if I have the exact figures with me, but there is a disparity between the number of notifications that are made and the number of screened-in notifications. There are a large number of notifications that come in, something like 48,000—we are on track for 48,000 this year—and we have about 20,000 screened-in notifications. So, there are a large number that are coming in that aren't, in fact, notifications that ought to be coming to the CARL line. That's one reason to have some form of process to pull out those queries, those notifications, in order not to take up valuable social worker time.

We have taken longer than I would have liked to bring this project in and we also have slightly fewer non-social workers, slightly fewer workers starting than I had hoped because we have lost a couple who we had appointed. Part of the reason that we took some time to do this, and as I say it was longer than I had liked, is because there have been a number of parties involved in working out how best to do this. The union, for example, has been quite concerned, and in some sense is quite hostile to the idea of having non-social workers taking calls.

However, we have worked through with them the use of these non-social workers in the context of a pilot in order to determine: does it in fact lower the wait time for people who are phoning up, and are we, at the same time, still seeing the same or possibly elevated, given the direction we are going in in child protection, number of screened-in notifications so that we are not missing notifications? We will work through that carefully and—

Members interjecting:

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE: I haven't used the term 'KPI' but I think a reduction in the call waiting is an indication of a KPI, I just didn't use the term 'KPI'. The reduction in the length of call waiting is—

Ms Chapman interjecting:

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE: Okay, I have said it three times—I have said it three times. If you can't be bothered to listen—

Ms SANDERSON: Supplementary?

The SPEAKER: Yes.