Damning child protection report: 'Inefficient, ineffective & unsustainable'

The system is crisis-driven, lacks clarity, and fails to monitor the wellbeing of the 14,000 kids in out of home care.

Of the $3.1 billion the Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ) spent last financial year, only a fraction went into family support services (13 per cent).

Rather than adopting an early intervention model supporting families at the earliest point before children need to be removed, and despite recommendations from numerous reviews, DCJ remains 'crisis driven', the report released today (June 6) says.

It is failing to meet its legislated responsibility to ensure families have access to services, and to prevent children from being removed to out of home care, it says.

Since 2018, there have been increasing child protection reports, escalating out of home care costs, insufficient placement options for children with complex needs, and limited services or support for children and families engaged in the child protection system.

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Of the 400,000 child protection reports the department received last year, more than 112,000 children were identified as at 'risk of significant harm.

However, most of them - 75 per cent - did not receive a home-based safety assessment by a DCJ caseworker to confirm those risks.

Their cases were closed with no follow up from DCJ, and DCJ did not know what the outcomes.

"Around 85,000 children had their cases closed without a home-based risk and safety assessment.

"Approximately 71,000 children had their cases closed because there were no available caseworkers to assess them in the home."

The multiple and repetitious nature of the department's five mandatory desktop assessments consumed the time of many caseworkers and managers, it said.

Where a service was provided, DCJ was unable to provide a breakdown of the types of services provided and their effectiveness was not evaluated or known.

"DCJ dedicates significant human resources to repetitious desktop assessments of child protection reports, but does not allocate sufficient resources to support families and children," it says.

Thanks to poor service planning, most families have no access to services to address or mitigate any underlying child protection risks in the home before a child is removed.

"The agency does not know whether the wellbeing of children is improving or declining. Many children experience trauma before, during and after being removed from their families," Auditor-General Bola Oyetunji said in her report.

"DCJ has failed in its duty of care by not assessing these children, and by not understanding how the agency's actions and decisions are affecting them over time."

While one of the department's aims was to restore children to their parents, that number was declining, down by nearly one third (27 per cent) between 2018 and 2023.

The department has failed to act on the findings of successive inquiries and reviews, it said.

There have been 12 in the past decade, involving more than 200 recommendations, yet DCJ has made minimal changes to its resource profile or service model.

The number of kids living in "costly and inappropriate environments" such as hotels, motels, and serviced apartments also came under fire.

That number was at 471 in August, 2023, a clear failure to provide 'safe, nurturing, stable and secure' accommodation.

That so-called emergency accommodation model cost the agency $300 million last financial year,

The department's arrangements with contracted non-government service providers were criticised for being overly complex and confusing.

There were delays in receiving payments, often due to the 'many layers of DCJ sign-offs' required.

In some instances, changes to program names, rules, and guidelines were made without notifying contracted organisations.

The audit has made 11 recommendations, the first, as an urgent priority, to implement "structured measures" to understand the experiences of children in out of home care in relation to their physical safety and psychological well being.

Others included putting an end to the use of emergency accommodation options such as hotels, introducing a better model to accredit and train foster carers, and developing an effective "business to business interface with contracted providers".

The second report released today, Safeguarding the rights of Aboriginal children in the child protection system, says the department has failed to deliver on Aboriginal strategies and reforms in the last five years.

The NSW Minister for Communities and Families Kate Washington said the department would accept, or "accept in principle" all of the recommendations.

"The findings of both the NSW Auditor-General's reports confirm everything we've been saying since we came into government - that the child protection system is in need of significant structural reform," Ms Washington said.

"The recommendations of these reports create a critical roadmap for reform, strengthening our drive for positive change.

"For the sake of vulnerable children in families right across NSW, we are determined to fix the broken child protection system that we inherited.

"We have begun the work to repair the system, but as laid out in these reports, there are significant issues in every direction, so it's going to take time to deliver the outcomes children and young people deserve."

Ms Washington said the Minns Labor Government's reform was focused on supporting at risk families, reducing the over-representation of Aboriginal children in out-of-home care and enhancing services to improve outcomes for children and young people in care into the future.

New initiatives now in place to address those issues included a specialist team to move children out of High-Cost Emergency Accommodation and into home-based care environments, a legal requirement for DCJ caseworkers to demonstrate to the NSW Children's Court what active efforts were taken to support families and prevent children entering care, and an urgent review of the foster care system to reduce the over-reliance on unsuitable High-Cost Emergency Accommodation

General Secretary of the Public Service Association Stewart Little said the report confirmed everything caseworkers had been saying for years.

"Child protection caseworkers have been saying for years the child protection system in NSW is in crisis and today this report has proved them right," said Mr Little.

"Most people would be shocked to learn only one in four kids reported as at risk of serious harm to child protection services ... is actually seen...

"So that means child protection caseworkers only see the very worst cases.

"So instead of proactively supporting families at their earliest point of contact and providing access to domestic violence or drug and alcohol or NDIS services for example they arrive on the doorstep months later when there is no chance of salvaging the situation, which often means they end up taking kids away."

Mr Little called for nong-government out of home care providers to be completely removed from the child protection system.

"They are getting in the way of child protection caseworkers looking after kids, and to add insult to injury they are costing more than the old system," he said.