Child Protection

Ms SANDERSON (Adelaide) (14:44): My question is again to the Minister for Education and Child Development. In line with both the royal commission and the Guardian for Children and Young People, can the minister outline her plans and the schedule for reducing the number of children in emergency care to that of emergencies only?

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Minister for Education and Child Development, Minister for Higher Education and Skills) (14:45): As members will be aware, this is a subject very dear to my heart. By one measure, the royal commission's recommendations, which we are spending the next couple of months working through redrawing the structure of the child protection system, will in large part address the question that the member has asked. How we design our out-of-home care system is a big part of the royal commission report and the way in which we can shift from emergency and residential care and into family-based care is an important element of that report.

As members may recall, last week I informed the house that I am also undertaking a discrete project, a discrete piece of work that takes the recommendations relating to foster care and kinship care within the report and doing additional work on consultation with those sectors and also with the children so that we can design a foster care and kinship care system that is most likely to maximise the number of families who are in a position to take on children. That is, in essence, the answer to the problem that we have in not having enough kids in family-based care and therefore in other forms of care, both residential and commercial care.

When I looked at the most recent reports analysing South Australia's performance in out-of-home care against other states, one of the features that strikes me is not that we—apart from New South Wales—have significantly fewer foster carers per capita, although New South Wales has an extraordinary number of foster and kinship carers, but that the number of placements per household is lower once you get past one child in the house. We have an average number of one-child foster care families in South Australia, a little bit below average in two, and then it really drops away with three kids, four kids and even larger family groupings.

One of the areas that I want this project to specifically look at is whether there are ways to encourage or to facilitate slightly larger numbers of kids within one home because that appears to be how most other states are able to have a higher proportion of their kids in family-based placements, which is obviously extremely important. So, far from wanting to simply design my own system and assume that I am able to come up with the perfect solution for dealing with our commercial care, emergency care and residential care problem, we will be drawing not only on Margaret Nyland's very good work but also on the voices of the people who are currently engaged in our system because they are the ones who best know what can facilitate changes.

That said, that is the restructure of the system as a whole. In the shorter term, we have been working extremely hard with the NGOs who run the foster carers, who are the agents for the foster carers, on maximising the number of kids who are getting out of commercial care. In one week, a few weeks ago, 24 children were removed from homes and all but two were able to go into another family-based placement. That's the kind of volume that we are dealing with in any given week.

The work that is being done with very frequent and regular meetings between Families SA Placement Services and these NGOs is absolutely crucial. We are open to any ideas that they forward in that context in order to deal with the short-term emergency problem that we have while, at the same time, recognising that we do need to really get underneath and improve the system to attract more foster carers.