Some of Victoria’s most vulnerable children will be moved out of residential care and into home-based care under a $43m plan from the state government.
Children enter out-of-home care when they are unable to live at home because of abuse or neglect, and while home-based care, such as foster care, is preferable, severe shortages in Victoria mean children are increasingly being placed in residential care as a stopgap measure.
Announcing the package, which would be rolled out over four years, families and children minister, Jenny Mikakos, said the funding would enable services and support to be tailored towards individual children and their foster or kinship carers.
Moving primary-school-age children living in residential care into home-based care, and focusing on the over-representation of Aboriginal children in out-of-home care, were priorities, she said.
A report from the state’s Commission for Children and Young People, released in January, found Indigenous Australian children in Victoria were 16 times more likely than the state’s other children to be in out-of-home care.
Victoria’s commissioner for Aboriginal children, Andrew Jackomos, said he was reviewing 1,000 Aboriginal babies and children in out-of-home care across the state in the hope some could be returned to their parents.
The review was part of the government’s Taskforce 1,000 initiative, aimed at improving the education, health and connection to culture of Aboriginal children in out-of-home care.
Jackomos told Fairfax Media that the taskforce had already assessed 250 cases.
“Those 1,000 Aboriginal babies and children across the state are dispersed,” he said. “We should know each one of those children.”
The chief executive of the Victorian Council of Social Service, Emma King, welcomed the government’s investment, and said tailoring support packages to individual children was essential to improving their experience within the child protection system.
“The state government should be commended for moving quickly to put $43m over four years towards moving children out of residential care and into a supportive kinship or foster care environment,” she said.
“We look forward to the government’s continued engagement and collaboration with the community sector to build on these recent announcements, so that all Victorian children can get the best possible start in life.”
The funding announcement follows a $19m investment from the state government earlier this year to provide additional staff and supervision to improve the safety of children in care.
A report from the Department of Human Services released in September found there were 64 substantiated cases of child abuse in Victoria’s out-of-home care system in 2013-14.
