Parental involvement has become a cornerstone of the movement to promote permanency planning for children and youth wo are placed — or at risk of placement — out of teir homes. Foster family care in particular provides many opportunities for effective involvement of biological parents in child welfare practice. Following consideration of the rationale and purposes of parental involvement, this article focuses on implications and guidelines for promoting optimal participation of biological parents.

For the child in residential care who, for whatever reason will not be returning to the natural family, long term foster placement is often seen as a means of providing a suitable alternative family environment. The formation of mutually satisfying emotional ties within a family setting is recognised as being an important ingredient is the healthy psychological development of a child. However, the high rate of foster placement breakdown attests to the fact that these ties are not easily formed.

In South Australia, at any one time, approximately 2,300 children are known to be living apart from their parents. Some 1,500 of these children are in foster care. A 1982 Department for Community Welfare survey of a 50% sample of children who had been in continuous foster care for more than three years revealed that, while 60%of the sample had experienced only one foster placement, 24% had experienced three or more foster placements. Figures are similar In the United States where analysis of eleven foster care studies revealed that some 23% of children had three or more placements. (Westman, 1979).

Most agencies that provide residential services for children and youth make some attempt to work with natural family members; e.g. mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, sister, or brother of those placed within these programmes. Some common approaches to this include the employment of social workers or involvement of other social agencies to undertake this work. Alternatively, a member of the direct care staff in a residential programme may be designated as a family worker and required to make extra effort to maintain links between the child in the programme and the natural family. Under all of these arrangements, direct care practitioners in residential programmes are expected to be responsive to natural family members visiting a child in the programme. They are also expected to support a child planning to return home for a family visit or returning to the programme from such an event.

This paper aims firstly to describe the existing Melbourne Family Care Organisation (M.F.C.O.) Service Information System (S.I.S.) and how it was developed. Although the system was developed to meet our own needs, it has also from the outset been considered to be an innovative demonstration to the field with the hope that other welfare agencies will organise their own systematic data collections to allow for pooling of information and thereby facilitating advocacy, lobbying and social comment. A copy of the computer program, therefore, is available free of charge to any agencies who consider it may be appropriate for them. Secondly, M.F.C.O. would like to share some of their experiences in the hope that other agencies interested in undertaking development of their own systems, may be able to avoid some of the pitfalls we encountered.