A change to how children in Tasmania’s out of home care system are looked after has been savaged by the children's commissioner Leanne McLean. McLean says the move to teams of case workers has caused stress for overworked staff and left some children feeling unsafe.
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00:00 Once designated to a case worker, now children in Tasmania's out of home systems like foster care are assigned to a team.
00:10 Instead of having a person to contact, they are given a generic phone number and email address.
00:16 Of hundreds moved to the new system in southern Tasmania, a quarter of them have a disability.
00:22 That meant that children with highly complex needs, including children that I have met as an advocate in detention, were being managed through a team based case management model.
00:31 The change was driven by staff shortages. The Children's Commissioner has been reviewing the system and says it's not working.
00:39 These are situations where children's rights under the Charter of Rights, and there are nine of those rights, are not being upheld.
00:47 The Commissioner found children didn't feel safe, didn't receive health care when needed, and weren't consulted and listened to seriously.
00:55 She found they didn't have regular meetings alone with workers, weren't treated respectfully, didn't have safe contact with their family, and were less supported in their education.
01:05 This is the most important job we have in the state, the care of at risk kids.
01:10 And we ask child safety workers to do it with one hand or both hands tied behind their back. It has to end.
01:16 It hasn't been a perfect system, but it was a response to a set of circumstances at the time, and we will learn from it, and we will work towards a longer term model.
01:27 Out of home care will be outsourced to the private sector, as recommended by the Commission of Inquiry.
01:32 But case management will still be the responsibility of the state government. Establishing how that will work could take years.
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