Foster care in the ACT

Hi and welcome to the Barnardos Canberra Out of Home Care information session. I’m Tam, and together with my colleague Dallas, we work in the foster care recruitment team at Barnardos Canberra.

We’d like to start our session today with an Acknowledgement of Country.
We wish to acknowledge the Ngunnawal people as traditional custodians of the land we are meeting on, and recognise any other people or families with connection to the lands of the ACT and our region.

We wish to acknowledge and pay respect to their continuing culture and the contribution they make to the life of this city and this region. We would also like to acknowledge and welcome other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people joining us today.

Barnardos has been supporting families in our community for more than 60 years in the foster and kinship care space and other child, youth, and family services.

We’re always on the lookout for caring people who live in the ACT who can offer their time, stability, and support to children in the area who are in need of a safe home.

As a foster carer, you’ll be giving a child the nurturing home and support they truly deserve. At Barnardos, we encourage and accept applications from people of all backgrounds regardless of your marital status, sexual orientation, and family structures — including whether you have children or not. Your application is welcome with us.

In this session, we will give you an overview of the foster care system, the supports that are created around families, the specialized needs of kids in care, and the different parts of the out of home care system in the ACT.

Let’s start by finding out how children actually come into care in the first place.

Typically, the process starts with a report made from the community or someone who comes in contact with a child through their field of work. For example, this could be a police officer, teacher, or health worker that notices signs of abuse; a neighbor who recognizes children are being neglected for long periods; or family and friends worried about a child close to them.

This report is received by the ACT Government Department for Child Youth and Families (CYF) and appraised based on the evidence provided.

If this is the first report, it would be unusual that emergency action or removal is taken at this stage. In most cases, intervention and support services are offered to the family first in an effort to maintain the family unit.

For example, in Australia, in one year:

There are over 290,000 children subject to notifications

Over 120,000 subject to investigation

Over 45,000 subject to substantiation of maltreatment

And over 10,000 children entered the out-of-home care system

Of these national statistics, 133 referrals for placements were made in the ACT.

However, in the event the home environment is deemed unsafe for a child’s physical and/or emotional well-being, the child is removed under an interim order through the Children’s Court.

While this is happening, CYF contact Barnardos to request a placement for the child with a carer.

The final stage is to seek a permanent arrangement for children in care, and this can mean one of two things: restoration to the birth family or care orders until they are 18 years of age, if it is unsafe for the child or young person to return.

The time frames for each stage will vary from case to case but may take several years.

If and when care orders to 18 years of age are granted, there will be a focus to further enhance permanency by exploring permanent orders. This may be in the form of an adoption order or enduring parental responsibility (ERP) provision. Applications for these orders can be made when a child or young person has been in their foster care placement for 12 months and has been the subject to a care order to 18 years for a period of 12 months.

Due to historic practices impacting our Indigenous people, adoption is not considered an appropriate pathway for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.

EPR is only considered when exceptional circumstances are met.

At the time of emergency action, if a kinship carer cannot be identified, foster carers are needed. This is where we step in and we can take on various foster care roles.

Barnardos Canberra has five primary types of foster care:

– Short-term or crisis

– Long-term

– Restorative

– Respite

– Specialized care

Short-term or crisis carers can care for children anywhere from one night to two years. These types of carers are crucial at the time of emergency action. They need to be prepared on short notice to look after children and might even get a call in the middle of the night to help a vulnerable baby, toddler, or teen.

During this period, regular contact may be expected with the birth family, so ideally, you would have the capacity to be able to get children to and from contact and sometimes be present at contact.

Long-term carers are usually people who have identified that they are best equipped to provide care for children who already have care orders to 18. As these orders can take a few years to be granted, children with care orders to 18 are typically not babies or toddlers.

Contact with birth family is often less frequent than in short-term or crisis care but still very important for a child’s identity, sense of belonging, as well as nurturing cultural identity.

It would also be desirable and sometimes requested that you take time off to integrate the child into your home. This additional time affords the child and yourself the opportunity to start the process of attachment — the foundation to a successful care placement.

Working toward restoration recognises a child’s basic human right to be with their parents, where it is safe to do so. Foster carers play a critical role in successful restoration. Our restorative carers provide care for children 0 to 17 years, actively supporting them to return to live with their family. During this period, regular visits will be expected with the birth family, so ideally you would have capacity to be able to get children to and from family time. Ideally, restoration carers would be at home or able to take leave from work or have flexibility in their employment to actively support restoration in the first months of placement.

Should restoration to parents or placement with family be unsuccessful, restorative carers may support a transition for the child to long-term carers or may be considered to be the long-term carers. Respite carers typically provide care one weekend a month to support foster and kinship carers. This support can be provided for a range of reasons — for example, to give other carers a break to enable them to focus on other children in their care, or it may be a one-off longer period while they need to travel or be in hospital for an operation. For ongoing respite, we ask carers to commit to a minimum of 12 months. Many respite carers develop strong bonds with children and their families and may provide respite beyond this commitment period.

On occasion, Barnardos needs foster carers for children or young people whose needs require more than would be expected within a generalized foster care placement — for example, physical, medical, and/or complex trauma-based needs. In these instances, Barnardos looks to provide a wraparound care package for the carers and child, which is inclusive of additional carer subsidy. Packages will be individualized to meet the needs of the child and may also assist the foster carer to extend their capacity and availability. If you feel you have the capacity and motivation to provide specialized care, please discuss this option with your allocated assessors.

Right now, you may still be deciding on what type of carer you want to be — that’s okay. In fact, many carers offer more than one type of care. For example, you might start as a respite carer before deciding you would like to provide short-term or crisis care. You’ll learn more about the benefits of each role and how you might be able to help a wide range of children as you complete the face-to-face training and get to know what type of care you’d be best equipped for.

The abuse and neglect that children experience throughout their relationships with their primary caregivers affects the way that a child’s brain develops. When children come into care, they need to be parented in a particular way using therapeutic parenting techniques. Children are supported to heal from their trauma.

This iceberg image illustrates that most people only see a small part of what is affecting a child — we call this the tip of the iceberg. Everything else that is affecting them is often unseen or, as per this image, underneath the water.

When you become a foster carer through the foster care training and with the support of therapeutic specialists within the agency, you can learn therapeutic parenting techniques.

General parenting techniques such as timeout may be unhelpful in this space because they don’t help the child heal from their trauma. Therapeutic techniques such as mindfulness, co-regulation, and time-in will help the child to develop better regulation and relationships.

Foster carers with Barnardos are given opportunities to have support through the Carer Support Program. The first person that you’ll have contact with after you’re approved as a foster carer may be your allocated Carer Support Worker. That person can help you with emotional support, help you access services, help you to understand decisions that are made about the child in your care, and also help you to advocate if you feel that you need help getting your point across.

You’ll also have access to your child’s caseworker who does the day-to-day work around the child organising, and they are the lynchpin of the care team — which you’ll learn about in the foster care training. The Carer Support Team also organizes ongoing training for foster carers, so you’ll have access to learning about therapeutic parenting, for example.

There are often social events organized where foster carers are encouraged to come along with the children in their care and build connections within this community.

Foster carers receive financial assistance for the children in their care. This is seen as an allowance or a reimbursement rather than a payment, and it will not cover the full cost of the child in your care but goes a long way towards paying for their needs.

You’ve already made the first steps towards becoming a foster carer by watching this information session. The next step in the process would be to complete an application pack and send it back to us. After we receive your application, we would enroll you for the foster care training, which is three full days of training and covers everything from the system of foster care, therapeutic parenting, and the neurobiology of trauma. It occurs over 3 days, often run Friday, Saturday, Sunday, but can sometimes run on consecutive Saturdays. Once you’ve completed the foster care training, we can start the assessment process. You’ll be allocated assessors from the Recruitment, Assessment, and Training team, and we’ll meet with you for six to eight in-depth interviews where we’ll talk about your motivation to become foster carers, your life and a little bit about your history, and also what you’ve learned in the training.

The final step in this process is for you to attend the Carer Assessment and Linking Panel, where we send a report to the panel members. They read it and endorse the recommendation of the report. During this process, you won’t ever get to the end and find out that you’re unsuitable to become a foster carer. We’ll keep you in the loop all the way and raise any concerns with you. Keep in mind that we only accept applications from non-smoking households.

We’re now at the end of our information session. Thanks for watching! We really hope that this information has helped you understand a little bit more about Barnardos and the out-of-home care system.

If you’d like to fill out an application pack, we can email it to you or we can post it to you. Please contact us through our application email address or give us a call. If you’ve got any questions after you’ve watched this, please don’t hesitate to get in touch — we’re very happy to talk to you.

Thanks for being part of helping to support and change the lives of young people in Canberra — they really need you.