July update from the Children's Guardian
On Monday 24 July, I hosted 40 representatives from the Department of Communities and Justice, including Youth Justice, along with representatives from government and non-government education, non-government out-of-home care agencies and religious sectors, to discuss challenges in responding to claims of historical child abuse.
An important part of protecting children today and into the future is acknowledging the mistakes of the past.
So it’s vital that claims of historical abuse are handled with sensitivity and respect, and that survivors receive the redress they’re entitled to. In addition, we also need to ensure that those who are the subject of complaints are treated fairly.
We’ve established a working group to further explore how we can improve our responses to claims of historical child sex abuse, and the full group will meet again in October.
As a regulator, it’s important for us to hold organisations accountable for meeting their legal obligations.
It’s also important for us to learn from those we regulate to improve our systems so they're as fair and efficient as they can be.
One of the most important groups in our community are those who provide home-based care to children in out-of-home care.
For some time, I have had concerns about the need for us to better engage with and respond to the concerns of foster carers. Against this background, I am very pleased that My Forever Family, with our support, has established a carer reference group to provide carer perspectives on how we can better support foster carers and respond to concerns they raise.
Our regulation of the agencies that provide statutory out-of-home care has implications for the carers of vulnerable children. But other work we do, such as administering the Working with Children Check and the Reportable Conduct Scheme, also has impacts on carers' lives.
The carer reference group will help us see our work from their perspective and identify ways we can better support them as foster or kinship carers, or in other contexts of statutory out-of-home care.
Other highlights of a busy month include travelling to Melbourne for a meeting of the National Therapeutic Residential Care Alliance where we explored issues relating to safety and quality in the residential care sector.
This issue is particularly important in light of concerns that have been broadly expressed across the community about the need to address critical safety and quality issues for young people in residential care services who often have very high levels of need.
Steve Kinmond OAM
