Child and Family Support Services

The Hon. J.S. LEE (14:34): My question is to the Minister for Human Services regarding children and families. Can the minister provide an update to the council about how the Marshall Liberal government is working towards a shared vision that all children are safe and well in family, community and cultural interactions?

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (Minister for Human Services) (14:34): I thank the honourable member for her question about this very important area, in which a significant amount of reform has been taking place. We were guided, I think the language should be, in relation to the Early Intervention Research Directorate findings several years ago, having come to office, about what is now known as the Child and Family Support System, that we needed to reform the system in order to make sure that we were able to provide a better suite of services to keep children safe.

I am really pleased that we have now been able to publish a road map for the system, which is part of Safe and well: Supporting families, protecting children. There is a record $52 million worth of funding over four years to target specific intensive family support services across metropolitan Adelaide and the regions.

Over the past two years, the Department of Human Services has been working closely with government and non-government partners to co-design and deliver this new system, which provides families with the right support at the right time to reduce the need for statutory child protection involvement, which I think is a goal that everyone in the community supports.

We want to make sure that vulnerable families can receive support at the right time, and that is in part why we have a newly established website called Adults Supporting Kids (ASK), which has already seen more than 5,000 users gain access to free or low-cost support from close to 1,000 providers across the state. In addition to this, we want to support the workforce of child and family practitioners to improve practice across the sector, so that was something we found in our co-design discussions, that we needed to do more capacity building in the sector and certainly making service more responsive to Aboriginal culture intergenerational trauma, and I have spoken before about how a third of the funding was ringfenced specifically for Aboriginal community controlled organisations.

The reform of the Child and Family Support System is a major part of Safe and well: supporting families, protecting children, and under this strategy agencies are working in partnership to support families at risk of entering the child protection system, to protect children from harm, including when they come into care, and investing in young people in care and leaving care, providing them with opportunities for a bright future.

The road map that has just recently been published is informed by knowledge from lived experience, culture, practice and research. It articulates a vision where the primary response to children and families with complex needs is a service system providing earlier intensive family support. We are well on the way to implementing the reforms that are in the road map, and have already recommissioned intensive family services.

We are also creating new data collection tools for practitioners and new data infrastructure so that we can build a more sophisticated understanding of family complexity, vulnerability, service needs and outcomes, and we are also, as I have mentioned, building the capacity of the workforce to work with high levels of family complexity in ways that are culturally safe and trauma responsive.

We know from the Early Intervention Research Directorate findings that some of the services we were providing were not as effective as they could be, so the services have been repositioned to provide greater intensity for those most in need.