Coordination and Collaboration

6 September, 2016

Themes from Nyland  #1

[spacer height=”2px”]The team from the Guardian’s office have analysed the 850 pages and 260 recommendations from The life they deserve: Child Protection Systems Royal Commission Report1.  We have extracted some themes and priorities to allow us to critique the government’s response, judge the improvements over time and to shape our own work.  There is a description of the issues and a short list of things to watch for as reform progresses.  We will post the rest of the series over the next few weeks. 2[spacer height=”20px”]

Children are affected by very many services on their journey into and through care.  The ease of their passage is largely determined by how well those services work together. [spacer height=”20px”]

In her report Commissioner Nyland states:

The new agency cannot operate in isolation. It should coordinate and collaborate with all other relevant departments and organisations, both government and non-government, to give children better outcomes. It must also be proactive and engage the community to play its part in developing programs and systems…

Services are often fragmented and poorly coordinated, leaving areas of duplication and service gaps … People find it difficult to navigate the system to access the services they need.[spacer height=”20px”]

Although guidelines exist for the sharing of information between agencies to protect children, the Commissioner describes major cultural barriers and legislative barriers to its use.  She favours the NSW model in which prescribed agencies are required by legislation to share.[spacer height=”20px”]

Information sharing between agencies is often poor and there is a siloed approach to service delivery, as opposed to a coordinated, multi-agency response, which may often be required.[spacer height=”20px”]

This is also apparent in the investigation of care concerns, where children have been poorly served by a failure of clarity, rigor and consistency among the agencies designated to address them.[spacer height=”20px”]

She observes that effective collaboration between levels of the Families SA hierarchy has been undermined by the progressive withdrawal of resourcing decisions from the professional staff who work directly with children to an unconnected management stream with a focus on budgetary matters.[spacer height=”20px”]

She notes the progressive weakening of Rapid Response.

… gains made in service accessibility for children in care through the government’s Rapid Response plan have not been sustained. The plan should be renewed and reinvigorated.[spacer height=”20px”]

The Report notes that effective collaboration between professional staff and foster carers is lacking in a significant number of instances.  The Commissioner gives credence to examples where ‘carers were treated poorly and the value of their contribution was minimised.’  [spacer height=”20px”]

She notes

Foster parents consistently complained about receiving insufficient information to help them manage the needs of the children.

 [carers live] in fear that the Agency will remove the child from them at any time.[spacer height=”20px”]

With reference to challenges facing residential care the Commissioner observes that

…change will only be effective if it is sustained and helps develop a culture of openness, where concerns are routinely discussed and addressed, and the issue of the ongoing risk to children is kept high on the agenda.[spacer height=”20px”]

As reform progresses we look forward to seeing:

1. Heads of relevant departments being required to meet at least quarterly and putting in place protocols to ensure interdepartmental coordination and cooperation and key performance indicators against which their performance in this area can be measured.
2. Revitalisation of Rapid Response including ‘establishing an inter-departmental committee to oversee Rapid Response and review its operation at least biannually’.
3. Legislative change to remove barriers to sharing of information between agencies and ‘an amendment to the Children’s Protection Act [that] could impose a duty on the prescribed bodies to coordinate decision making and delivery of services for children.
4. The child protection agency leading state-wide workforce planning in collaboration with NGOs and the tertiary sector.
5. The establishment of new bodies to manage care concerns including rigorous guidelines for the allocation of responsibilities between agencies.
6. Some devolution within the child protection hierarchy of decisions about the resourcing of care to field staff and away from senior management.
7. Concrete and sustained efforts to improve collaborative relationships between foster carers and professional staff where carers are more informed and consulted and workers and foster carers collaborate more effectively in the interests of children in their care.

Please join the discussion via the reply box leaving a name and an email address in the spaces provided.  We will remove them from the published post if you request in your reply.

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1 Unless otherwise noted all quotes are from The life they deserve: Child Protection Systems Royal Commission Report,

2 This is not intended to be a précis of Commissioner Nyland’s report which provides a very clear and readable summary.  Because of the Guardian’s mandate, our analysis will tend to focus on issues for children in out-of-home-care.