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Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Grievance Debate
Today I grieve for the state of Victoria's child protection workforce. I also grieve for our most vulnerable children who have been victims of neglect and abuse and who are not getting the protection they need because of the Brumby Labor government's failure to address this crisis in our child protection workforce.
Child protection workers are the backbone of the child protection system. They are the front line -- they take calls, they investigate claims, they work with families and they make the hard decisions to make sure our children are protected. Unfortunately what we are seeing is an ongoing failure of the Brumby government to address the massive workforce needs in the child protection system.
What I would like to go through in this grievance debate is a chronology of the last five or six years and to highlight the continued failures. The issues we saw five or six years ago are now exactly the same. The language is the same, the issues are the same, and this government has not done anything to make it any different.
What we are seeing, firstly, is an increasing complexity in the child protection system. In 2003 there was a report into child protection that said workers cited violence and threats of assault from parents and an increasing incidence of parental drug abuse and mental illness. This was a major reason they were leaving the system. What do we see today?
Agencies no longer can deal with the early intervention services they are set up to deliver because of staff shortages and the complexity of clients they are seeing daily. They are servicing a crisis rather than doing the work that they are set up to establish to prevent it from occurring.
We are hearing that calls to the Child FIRST system have doubled but the resources have not been put in place to match the increase in the volume of need. Now Child FIRST is also moving to a crisis-based system, where only the most severe cases can get supported.
What else do we see? We see inexperienced staff who are hit the hardest in the crisis evident in the system. In 2003 a Department of Human Services task force report found an incredibly high burnout rate amongst young people who leave that employment because of excessive workloads and poor pay.
What do we see in 2009? Solicitors are claiming there is a chronic problem of inexperienced and overtaxed caseworkers. Given the increased complexity we hear about in the Child FIRST system, which is the family information, referral and support team system, it is clear these inexperienced workers do not have the training in mental health and trauma that is needed to help young people in the system. We are also seeing that university graduates are being burnt out by what are described as soul-destroying workloads.
We also need to have a look at the government's focus on process rather than outcomes. In 2003 the child protection outcomes project, which was carried out by a DHS (Department of Human Services) task force, found that the system focused on administrative processes rather than outcomes for families. In 2009 we are once again hearing from case managers, one of whom has said she is going to quit because the department is more concerned with risk management than child welfare. She went on to say that:
- Originally the system was set up to protect kids, but now I think that it's more arse-covering than actually doing something.
The department is focusing on what is being done, not on what is being achieved and whether it is fundamentally changing the outcomes and improving situations for children. How do we see this actually manifesting? It is manifesting in workforce retention being at crisis levels. In 2003 the data was that one in five child protection workforce members were leaving each year and that WorkSafe Victoria had identified staff shortages and inadequate supervision of staff and found that child protection workers were experiencing stress, high blood pressure, diarrhoea, sleeplessness, fatigue, panic attacks, loss of appetite and crying at work and at home. The Community and Public Sector Union accused the DHS of failing to protect workers and of therefore putting children at risk. The CPSU said the workers' extremely long hours were 'having a huge toll on their health and their safety'.
What do we see in 2009? Twenty-three per cent of front-line child protection workers have resigned over the last year, and one-third of child welfare specialists employed by the community sector to help struggling families have also resigned. WorkSafe Victoria says there are unreasonable workloads, chronic low morale, growing waiting lists, fatigue, poor pay and increasingly complex needs of families, and that this is impacting on staff retention. The language used and issues are common elements: six years on nothing has actually changed.
Surprise, surprise! We also see bullying and intimidating behaviour by the department. A newspaper article of 25 August 2003 reported on Karen, a senior child protection worker who feared losing her job if she was identified.
In 2009 we hear about departmental protection workers who decline to be named for fear of reprisal. Once again this is the result of bullying and intimidation of people within the system who want to speak out about how the system is not working but fear for their jobs if they do so.
We are seeing that all this is placing children at significant risk. In 2003 there were examples of staff shortages resulting in some children not being allocated child protection workers in a timely manner, and a 2004 study talked about professionals -- teachers and doctors -- who should be reporting having stopped doing so because they did not believe anything would be done to solve the problem. The child safety commissioner in that period delivered a report called Child Death Group Analysis -- Effective Responses to Chronic Neglect. I would like to refer to a couple of cases from that analysis, which looks at the number of reports and what was actually done about them. These are reports relating to children who subsequently died.
In case 'F' there had been four reports that were not investigated before a fifth report, which was substantiated. The case was open at the time the child died. In case 'J' there were multiple reports over a long period of time -- a number unsubstantiated and one substantiated -- and then nine reports in a row that were not investigated, even though there had been a previous substantiated case of child abuse. The next report was substantiated, and, again, when the child died the case was open. It is very disturbing and disappointing. It reflects the pressure workers are under and their inability to investigate cases which should be investigated.
Again, what do we see today? Child protection workers are managing double the workloads, meaning some children are waiting up to a year to be allocated a case manager. DHS staff are forced to do health and safety checks over the phone because there is not enough time to do them face to face. The impact on children is significant.
We have seen a lot of reporting recently about out-of-home care, where unknown agency staff are filling in and young people do not have any continuity in workers. It is incredibly hard to develop trust in that environment, and it is no wonder that the outcomes for children in out-of-home care are as poor as they are. This was also raised by the Auditor-General in 2005, and we can see it is an ongoing issue.
We also have significant ongoing concerns about professionals who under mandatory reporting are now required to report but who are not getting appropriate responses. I refer to a case reported in the Herald Sun of 26 May. There are dreadful examples of abuse and injury to young people, and this is one of particular concern. The article states:
- The primary school teacher told Melbourne Magistrates Court she and a colleague contacted DHS many times after first noticing bruising to his face in 2007.
- 'We just kept ringing', she said.
- But every time they reported new injuries they spoke to a different worker, including one who put the boy's wounds down to 'self-mutilation'.
- 'I was absolutely appalled', the teacher said.
Unfortunately, as we see in the papers and as we hear in the sector, these examples continue.
Last year Sandie de Wolf, the chief executive officer of Berry Street, said the culmination of out-of-home care and workforce shortages meant that if we were not already in crisis, we would be facing one very shortly.
What have we seen over the years from this government? Back in 2002 the Victorian Child Death Review Committee in a report identified issues with workloads, recruitment, retention of staff, backfilling of positions and supervision, particularly in rural areas. In 2003 a task force said one in five child protection workforce workers leaves each year due to high case loads and low pay. All this time the opposition had been raising these issues with the government, asking what was going to be done and demanding action. In 2004 the child protection outcomes project recommended the development of a comprehensive long-term workforce planning strategy. These were very clear messages to this government many years ago.
In March 2004 the then Minister for Community Services, Minister Garbutt, set up the family and placement services sector development plan; its role was:
- ... to identify the current and future challenges facing the sector
- ... identify the actions required to meet these challenges
- ... develop a realistic and achievable process for meeting these challenges.
That was five years ago and a key focus for one of the subcommittees was to work on workforce planning. Interestingly, when you look at the details, who was actually chairing this committee to develop the family and placement services sector development plan? None other than the current Minister for Community Services, then on the backbench as the member for Bellarine.
The current minister has been in the midst of this issue for five years but is still failing to take action.
In 2005 the Auditor-General identified workforce issues involving the recruitment and retention of qualified staff, and actually said:
- ... the recently established Sector Development Plan Workforce Planning Working Group would help to address this gap. This group is examining current and future workforce needs ... with a focus on recruitment, retention and training.
At least we have a very clear pathway for this government to do something about the massive failures in the workforce planning system back as far as 2004, but still we continue not to see any action.
In 2006 the sector development plan background paper on workforce issues was actually released. As I said, the current Minister for Community Services chaired and oversaw that process. That was an incredibly detailed document that lookedatall the issues, that had hours of input from across the sector; very senior members were on that group and had lots of solutions and ideas. Two and a half years ago that paper was published by the department but still we have not seen any action.
In 2007 the University of Ballarat for the Criminology Research Council found that there were young and inexperienced workers who were burnt out and exploited, yet the system continued to fail to address it.
What have we also seen from the opposition?
As shadow minister I have been raising these questions, challenging the government to do something about it and trying to understand how we can fix this fundamental crisis in the child protection workforce. But unfortunately the response to questions on notice put to the minister has shown how the government has failed to understand the issues and to act.
In question 982 to the minister I asked, with reference to some funding that was promised for additional child protection workers, how many had been employed and had the use of the funds been evaluated. The answer was:
- It is not possible to attribute the specific recruitment of child protection workers to this ... allocation.
Here is a policy from this government to put in over $4 million for additional workers but it cannot tell us whether any workers have actually been recruited under that specific policy commitment. It has not evaluated the impact of the funding to see if it was successful in achieving recruitment and whether it has retained the staff.
In question 1324, again in the Assembly to the minister, I asked how many vacancies there were in child protection services at the start of each year. The response from the minister was:
- This data is not routinely collected across Child Protection Services ...
Again the government does not know how many workers it is recruiting with its financial policy commitments; it does not know the impact of the funding it is committing; it does not even know how many vacancies it has.
These clear workforce issues that have been flagged year in, year out by very qualified senior sector and community leaders have not been addressed by this government.
In December 2008 the children, youth and families policy and funding plan identified a priority action for 2008-09: a child protection workforce strategy. Fantastic! Five years after it has been identified, and year in, year out there being a massive issue, we finally see a commitment from this government.
It is incredibly distressing for families, for individuals, and particularly for the workforce in the child protection sector who are stressed and under pressure, that they are not getting the support, not getting the strategic thinking, not getting what they need from this government to make sure that our most vulnerable can be protected and supported.
The Minister for Community Services has been leading an initiative on this for five years but has failed to act. She is complicit in the failure of the child protection workforce, and she must act now to make sure that the child protection system can support our most vulnerable into the future.
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