Foster care in Victoria is under strain. As Victoria implements major legislative and service system reforms, we should consider how the future of foster care can be informed by its past. To that end, this paper revisits the document on which Victoria’s current system of foster care was founded, Tierney’s 1973 report ‘Prospects and Tasks in Foster Care’. With reference to that template, this paper examines some of the service system changes that have threatened the viability of foster care, and draws attention to some enduring qualities of foster care that nevertheless are worthy of preservation.

In recent times, Australian children have been exposed to a range of frightening images of war and terrorism in the media. To determine the possible impact of such distal events, fears were measured in a sample of 220 children aged 6 to 12 years using the Fear Survey Schedule for Children (FSSC-R) as well as a free option method. On the FSSC-R, the type and intensity of children’s fears were similar to previous studies conducted over the past two decades, with being hit by a car, bombs and being unable to breathe producing the most fear. By contrast, spontaneous responses indicated that children’s greatest fears were of animals, the dark and being lost. Surprisingly few children mentioned war and terrorism without prompting. The findings suggest that concerns about Australian children becoming more fearful as a result of media coverage of war and terrorism are not supported.

The Looking After Children (LAC) system is currently used in a number of countries world wide, providing increasing opportunities for international research collaboration. This paper describes early results of one such collaborative effort between Canada and Australia. The LAC system is a child-centred case management approach aimed at enhancing the developmental needs of children and young people in out-of-home care placements. LAC has the capacity to connect research, policy and practice. For research and practice LAC measures and enhances outcomes of care. Aggregation of data collected via the use of LAC allows policy makers to assess current practices in order to monitor and measure the extent to which intended program goals are achieved. LAC promotes and encourages collaboration in the care system, enhancing participation opportunities and partnerships between social workers, direct carers (foster parents and residential workers), parents, children and young people.

During 2003-2005, Anglicare Victoria conducted study groups for their advanced caseworkers. This program was developed in consultation with senior staff within the context of Anglicare Victoria’s Services Practices Manual, including Theoretical Frameworks. It aimed to provide senior practitioners with peer support, education and discussion.

The study group model was a collaborative approach using adult teaching principles and strategies. Central to each session was a case presentation from one of the participants which provided an opportunity to integrate learning with theory and practice. A training model of the study group is presented.

Evaluation indicated that the study group reduced participants’ isolation, increased their confidence in engaging family members, including fathers, and broadened their conceptualisation of family problems. Learnings and proposed changes to future study groups are identified.

This article is about parent blaming. It draws on the authors’ experience in health care agencies and the children’s court. Parent blaming involves practitioners attributing to parents an ‘excess’ level of responsibility expressed as ‘blame’ in regard to child care and protection or child treatment issues in the context of health. In the course of this process, structural factors such as low income, poor housing, unemployment, social isolation and prejudice that affect a parent’s capacity to protect and care for a child are frequently ignored.

Parent blaming is not a new phenomenon although currently it seems to be in vogue among practitioners in these fields. When blame is conveyed to parents, it creates anger and resentment and guarantees a non-cooperative response from them. This response is then all too readily used as evidence to support the view that parents are indeed to blame for their child’s lack of safety or medical condition. In practice, a blaming approach is futile. Suggestions are made about how this phenomenon can be avoided and how more positive approaches can be adopted to providing services to children and their families.

In partial response to two fatal utility truck accidents involving local school students, the School Focused Youth Service Coordinator and the Student Welfare Coordinator decided to form a boys’ reference group to find out if the school was meeting the boys’ health and well-being information needs. This resulted in 20 young men discussing and deciding on how they would find out the information, then developing a survey and distributing it to 113 boys. A wealth of information was gained from the completed surveys from young men in Years 8, 9 and 10 on what their information priorities were and how they would like the information delivered.

Australian child protection services have been slower than some of their overseas counterparts, such as the United Kingdom, to recognise the need for specific services for young people leaving care. The last 10 years, however, have seen a body of research into the needs of young people leaving care in various Australian States, with the resulting establishment of specific services in some States. As each State is governed by different Acts that regulate the services provided to young people in care, the development of new services has, of necessity, been on a state by state basis, with little or no coordination or consistency of service provision across Australia.

The 2004 Forgotten Australians report is the most recent in a series of enquiries highlighting the prevalence of abuse in Australian child welfare institutions. The final report was heavily reliant on oral evidence from survivors and called for ongoing historical research to investigate the conditions which allowed such abuse to exist. This paper is a preliminary response to that call.

Drawing on the records of a range of Victorian child welfare organisations, it argues that there is evidence in the archives both for the existence of institutional abuse and of individual and systemic responses to the problem. However, the evidence is not always found in the obvious places, nor does it support a simplistic explanation of the prevalence and tolerance of abuse in such settings.

This article is written as a bold opinion piece. It stems from the fact that once again we are seeing reports of abuse in residential care while at the same time there are calls for the reclaiming of residential care as a positive choice for children and youth. Yet there seems to be confusion as to exactly what function these programs should perform in the broader out-of-home care system. There are also important questions about the knowledge and skills that staff would require if such programs are to be non-abusive. A rejoinder to this opinion piece would be welcome.

Particularly in western societies, the notion that children are biological property has been a strongly implicit idea for many generations. It has therefore also been an idea that has implicitly pervaded our child welfare legislation and practice for generations, despite frequent legal rhetoric about the rights of the child. In this paper, the author traces the negative effects on welfare practice that this notion of children as property has had over the last half century. In doing so, the author calls not only on his professional experience, but also on his personal experience as a foster, adoptive and permanent care parent. Some provisions within the new Victorian child protection legislation are examined to gauge their capacity to address the negative effects on practice of this persistent notion, and reason found for some guarded optimism.