Working with children and families

Our first priority is to keep families safely together.

Legislation

Under section 37 of the Care Act, if the Secretary determines that a child or young person is at risk of significant harm, the Secretary must offer Alternative Dispute Resolution processes to the family of the child or young person before seeking care orders from the Children’s Court (unless there are exceptional circumstances).

Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR)

ADR is a term used to describe a variety of different processes where an impartial facilitator helps people resolve issues and disputes between them. ADR must be offered by DCJ to a family when a child or young person is found to be in need of care and protection in an effort to prevent them from being taken into care. Family Group Conferencing is DCJ’s preferred form of ADR.

Family Group Conferencing

Family group conferencing (FGC) is a family-focussed, strengths based form of alternative dispute resolution. It aims to strengthen partnerships between family members and encourages greater parental decision making and responsibility. FGC aims to provide an opportunity for families working with DCJ to develop their own plan to keep their children safe.

Risks to children are reduced when families have a support network to help them reach their goals and address the factors placing their children at risk. FGC gives families ownership to develop their own plans for how they will work together to protect their children. When these plans are effective, they have the ability to prevent children entering out-of-home care. FGC can occur more than just once in working to support the family and ensure the safety of the children.

FGC is an essential component of working with Aboriginal families to ensure the maximum number of opportunities for support are explored. In accordance with the Principles of the Aboriginal Case Management Policy, any FGC should be in line with best practice principles of Aboriginal family-led decision making.

Other forms of ADR conducted by an impartial facilitator include:

• Family Dispute Resolution (facilitated by Legal Aid or a Family Dispute Resolution Service
• Care and Protection Mediation (facilitated by Legal Aid)
• Mediation (facilitated by a Community Justice Centre mediator)
• Private mediation (facilitated by an accredited mediator - this could be a mediator chosen or agreed to by the family).

Family Action Planning

Case planning is the core of purposeful work that supports families to make sustainable change that helps keep children safe. Case planning is a family led process which helps families make clear links between specific actions and the behaviours that need to change to create child safety. By bringing parents on board and supporting them to take ownership of the changes needed, we will be able to increase child safety and have a clearer sense of their actual readiness and ability to make sustainable changes.

Family Action Plans are case plans for change that are developed in partnership with families and their support networks to address concerns for children’s safety. The focus of these plans is to influence change until the risk level comes down and it is safe for children to stay safely at home.

Family action planning involves:

• creating a future vision of family safety
• building a shared agreement of what needs to change
• stepping out the actions needed to achieve that change
• engaging and connecting with support services (based on how ready the family is) to assist in those steps
• measuring progress towards a goal.