REISSUED - Please check against delivery.
Madam Speaker, in accordance with a commitment to the House, I will now provide an update on the issue of Child Protection Services on the North-West Coast.
As I have stated, I take full responsibility for what has occurred and in asking for an urgent report into the circumstances, I have been determined to not only find out what happened, but to also ensure it does not happen again.
This Government recognises that in order to better protect children, we must support families.
The Government realises that the Child Protection System is broken and needs rebuilding.
This government is already delivering a wide range of new initiatives which are already significantly strengthening our ability to reach out to Tasmania’s most vulnerable children and their families.
Measures undertaken include bedding down Signs of Safety and the Three and Under Review Panel to ensure regular and consistent review of cases of children under the age of three.
In addition, to increase the numbers of professionally qualified staff who have the necessary expertise to work with children, a new model of staff supervision called PASE, is being implemented in partnership with the University of Tasmania so as to deliver one model of professional supervision across Children and Youth Services, as well as consistent workload tools.
A new online Practice Manual has also been developed, with the first phase going live in July.
Other proactive measures this Government has been undertaking in CYS include:
Madam Speaker, questions in this House have largely focused on communications between the Department, my Ministerial Office and me.
I once again put on the record that my Office was alerted to an issue on the North West the week before I was advised on Monday, 17 August, with an information brief received on the 17 August.
While this was disappointing, as the Report I am releasing today makes clear, the Department however, when they had found out about this issue, did not sit on its hands, but had swung into action immediately operationally.
Madam Speaker, it is also important to put on the record the sequence of events and how the Government’s reform agenda did, in fact, lead to the discovery of the unallocated notifications.
For a number of years, the services of Children and Youth Services has been delivered through a regional service structure, which has not always provided prompt and appropriate reporting, nor allowed management to support good practice.
Earlier this year, an independent review of the governance and leadership structures of Children and Youth Services was undertaken by Mr Terry Murphy from Resolutions Consultancy.
The findings of that review were provided to the Department on the 20th April 2015.
The review identified that the then structure of regional arrangements and lack of operational sight by the Deputy Secretary was deeply problematic.
It recommended changes to a statewide senior leadership structure of CYS, with a focus on enhanced responsibility of program leaders and the removal of an additional single point of executive responsibility.
I first outlined this new structure during the Budget Estimates Committee on 11 June 2015.
It was in the context of moving to the new leadership structure and a “clean line of sight” of the Deputy Secretary to the operational management of Child Protection Services, that the unallocated child protection notifications were discovered.
The new leadership structure commenced on the 1st July 2015. During a data presentation to the new CYS Executive Leadership Team on 30 July 2015, it was highlighted that in the North West, there were 151 unallocated notifications held in two groups – 71 notifications on the “active transition” list and a further 80 notifications held by a Team Leader.
It also found in the North West, there was a trend towards an intake “bottle neck” of notifications in active transition – that is, unallocated – that began with sharp spikes in November 2014 and February 2015 – and significantly exceeded normal business fluctuations in June 2015.
Before I turn to the operational response to that data, and the circumstances by which the notifications were allowed to remain unallocated, I want to talk about staffing and resourcing.
Business intelligence systems have been utilised to determine whether workload was a factor.
It found the backlog of intake notifications occurred over a period where there was -
This analysis would suggest, as was my initial advice to the House, that resourcing was not a factor in this matter.
Further, the report makes it clear that the unallocated notifications did not represent a complete stoppage of workflow, because activity as usual was being progressed by child protection staff.
Madam Speaker, as I have said, the Department’s operational response was immediate on discovery of the unallocated notifications.
CYS put in place a two-pronged strategy to address the identified issue, consisting of both immediate remedial action as well as a performance improvement strategy for child protection on the North-West.
The CYS Executive Leadership Team has overseen the response, with resources and additional staff support drawn from professional expertise from across the State. This included:
Madam Speaker, the most important priority for the Government was to get to the bottom of why this incident had occurred.
The report’s observations and findings have revealed practices underway in the North-West which were outside the procedures in the CYS Practice Manual and contrary to practice undertaken in other regions across the State.
Within the NW, it had become normal practice for notifications to first be received and created by administration staff. Administrative workers do not however, have the practice knowledge to be able to make determinations on notifications.
The Report found that there were 921 notifications created by an administrative worker in the North-West – whereas in other regions of the State, all intake notifications are immediately referred to the Intake Worker.
This enables the notification to be managed immediately and allocated directly to the child protection practitioner, without the need for referral to a Team Leader.
In effect, contrary practices adopted in the North-West led to double handling and such practices will cease immediately and professional development offered to staff.
Madam Speaker, information and data systems provide detailed and thorough reports to managers to support them with their work. They can provide details of workflow and workload at a statewide, regional, team and individual level.
They also allow line of sight on critical workflow issues.
The report finds that the workplace tools available to employees in the North-West were not being routinely used to support work load management and supervision.
The report also finds –
Madam Speaker, the Report provides 11 recommendations. Six of those have already been fully implemented in the Department’s operational response since discovering the unallocated notifications.
A further four recommendations are currently being implemented.
And one of the recommendations which relates to monitoring progress and implementation of the report’s outcomes, is included in the Government’s Redesign of the Child Protection System.
Madam Speaker, as the report states, there is a long history in Tasmania of reviews, reports and analysis of the Child Protection System, most of them pointing towards a requirement for systemic, structural reform.
Unfortunately, Tasmania has not been able to achieve the level of reform required to dislodge the entrenched issues identified in the reports.
Despite the best efforts of all involved, the system faces potential collapse if comprehensive reform action is not taken, regardless of the level of any additional resources that are added to it.
However, as the report also notes, Tasmania now has the opportunity to pursue a program of system redesign that will address the entrenched culture, processes and structures of the current child protection service.
Therefore Madam Speaker, I have been given the full support of the whole Government in undertaking significant redesign of the Child Protection System to deliver long-term sustainable improvement.
I am immediately establishing a Redesign Reference Group, that will develop, within six months, a comprehensive redesign of child protection services in Tasmania, from the bottom up, based on international best practice, to fundamentally change the way we deal with families at risk, and the way we apply protective intervention.
The Group will be led by independent Professor Maria Harries, Adjunct Professor at Curtin University and a Senior Honorary Research Fellow in Social Work and Social Policy at the School of Population Health at the University of Western Australia.
Dr Maria Harries, has numerous publications in child protection and public policy, including Tasmania’s Legislative Amendments Review Reference Committee in 2012, and the Advocacy for Children in Tasmania Review in 2013.
This group will be supported by a cross-agency team including;
Madam Speaker, as the Report also notes, Child Protection workers rarely get thanks for the work they do, yet they take on the challenge of working with some of the most vulnerable members of our community.
There are good, passionate, dedicated people working right across child protection services, but they are being let down by a history of failed reform attempts and poor systems and supports.
Our comprehensive Redesign will feed into the 2016-17 Budget process.
Not only will we embed the recommendations articulated in this report, and continue with the reforms already underway, we will through consultation with key stakeholders redesign the Child Protection System to ensure that parents and children who come into contact with the statutory care system are supported and kept safe, while staff are provided with the tools and a rewarding environment to allow them to work at their best.
Madam Speaker, the 2011 inquiry into Tasmania’s Child Protection Service stated that ‘The majority of children referred to the child protection system come from families that are affected by a combination of other issues that include financial difficulties, substance abuse, mental health symptoms, inadequate housing and family violence.
This statement confirms that rebuilding our child protection system cannot be done in isolation to other government agencies, services and initiatives across our community.
Factors that result in children entering our child protection system reflect the broader social, cultural, educational and economic dimensions of our community and each of these domains needs to also be considered in a systematic and thoughtful way to improve the situation of children and families. Having a job, a safe and secure place to live, being able to send your children to school and generally providing for your family is one of the most important ways this Government, across all agencies, can reduce and prevent the number of children coming into child protection.
The Government cannot however, provide continuity, connection, care and protection alone – supporting families and protecting children is everyone’s responsibility.
The Government will however play its part in that process by helping people to move out of disadvantage by strengthening the economy to create more jobs, to break the entrenched circle of generational poverty that has existed in this State for many years and to help create communities which encourage resilience over reliance.
We are also addressing our educational standards so that Tasmanians can get better jobs, and we are committed to tackling family violence – which I see as one of the main causes of children coming into child protection.
These are all initiatives the Government is doing and will continue to do, each and every single day, because ultimately this is about our children, their future, and our state's future
Madam Speaker, I now table the North West Child Protection Services Report.
Further, in the interests of full transparency, a copy of the Report is now publicly available on the DHHS website.