Child Protection

Ms SANDERSON (Adelaide) (14:49): My question is to the Minister for Education and Child Development. What is the current policy regarding the handling of tier 3 notifications and the use of family care meetings? In the 2014-15 year, there were 1,093 tier 3 notifications that were closed with no action. A further 1,312 tier 3 intakes were received, of which only 78 were given invitations to family care meetings, and only 33 attended. Thus, only 1.3 per cent were getting any help.

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Minister for Education and Child Development, Minister for Higher Education and Skills) (14:50): Again, just to give some context for the rest of the chamber, tier 3 notifications are the way in which the triage is created for notifications that come through the CARL, which is the Child Abuse Report Line. What occurs is that we have an enormous volume that come in initially—it's something like 60,000 that came in last year—then there is a screening down to notifications, and then screened-in notifications, which have remained stable at around 20,000 a year for the last two or three years.

Within those notifications—and that's where we pick up 19 per cent of children who by the age of 10 will have had at least one of those screened-in notifications, so a very broad number of children caught—we then attempt to determine the urgency and the seriousness, which are two separate but related concepts.

With tier 3, what we have been observing for some time is that it was difficult to get to tier 3—it is, in fact, difficult to get to all of the tier 2—and therefore there was a risk that families in that situation (which is a lower level of concern) would not receive any support and, therefore, might well become more serious over time. So, we are constantly trying to work out ways of getting better early intervention.

What we established last year, and it is starting to have some effect, is the Linking Families team where the lower level notifications, which are unlikely at that point in time to require the heavy investigative approach that is pointed at leading families towards the court to determine in whose custody these children should live—that what we would do with the tier 3s is to re-create this Linking Families work where they could start to get some early intervention and support. That is only just starting to pay off, but it's important.

Members may remember that I had the intention to have some people who were not trained social workers but were, nonetheless, skilled individuals to come in and answer the calls in the CARL because we've had this increasing problem of wait times because of the increasing traffic into that service. Because Margaret Nyland categorically said that she did not want to have non-social workers answering the phones at CARL, what we did was take those people we are in the process of employing and put them into that Linking Families work to bolster that effort, and also to be able to move some social workers onto the answering of the calls and the emails that are coming through.

We are doing our best to balance the work through that office, and also trying to have a differentiated response, depending on the extent of the severity of the notification. At no point do I suggest that the notifications are all being handled in the way in which we would like, and there are recommendations in Margaret Nyland's report about that. There are also suggestions through the process of consultation on those recommendations that we are having. So we are constantly interested in different advice on how to manage it all, so we carry some vacancies that clearly I would like to see filled. As members would be aware, I have raised that previously. That is how we are attempting to support families and children who come to our attention through the tier 3 notifications.

Ms SANDERSON: Supplementary?

The SPEAKER: The member for Light.