Out of home care services look after children and young people when a family needs support, in cases of family conflict or if there is a significant risk of harm or abuse in the family home. Support services help the children and young people to cope with their experiences and assist their families to deal with the issues that led to the placement of their child.
Adoption services provide counselling and advice for birth parents, assess prospective adoptive parents and arrange the adoption of infants and children who cannot live at home. These children are placed with adoptive parents to form a new family, which is later legalised by an adoption order. Adopted children may have ongoing contact with their birth parents.
Data on Voluntary Child Care Agreements
Home Based Care Handbook
This handbook has been developed by DHS in liaison with the Foster Care Association of Victoria (FCAV). This handbook starts to address issues in home-based care but is not a rule book and does not explain every issue that may arise.
Reviewing Kinship Care Policy and Practice
The Placement and Support Unit within the Office for Children is reviewing Kinship Care policy and practice. Kinship care placements are the first preference under the new Children Youth and Families Act 2005 (section 10 (h)), and now comprise one third of all placements in Victoria - approximately 1600 children live in kinship arrangements.
Care Leavers (Forgotten Australians)
In 2003/04, the Senate Community Affairs References Committee held an inquiry known as Children in Institutional Care. A report containing 39 recommendations and titled Forgotten Australians ¿ a report on Australians who experienced institutional or out of home care as children was tabled on 30 August 2004.
Looking After Children Outcomes Data Project
The LAC outcomes data project was undertaken in order to exploit the potential of the existing A&ARs, completed in the course of everyday practice, for deriving outcomes data about children in out of home care. This project aimed to see if it was possible to derive sufficient high quality data from paper based A&AR data that could be validly aggregated in order to establish a baseline for monitoring children's progress over time, and to determine the feasibility of using A&AR data for this purpose in an ongoing way.
