Pioneering an evidence-based approach.
The role for the Centre now is to provide the evidence-base to inform the continuing challenges for those children who are at high risk of being abused or neglected, and for those children and their families who are involved in child protection or who have been removed into state care. These challenges include:
- The need for a strong Australian evidence-base for strong family support and intensive family preservation interventions that work for families with multiple and complex needs;
- An evidence-base to inform service provision to address the continuing over-representation of Indigenous children in child protection services;
- Continuing to provide research to inform what best practice child protection services comprise;
- Understanding how best to support our child protection workforce to provide high quality services to vulnerable families; and
- Investigating how to provide the best and most effective models of care for children removed from their parents.
The Centre continues to work closely in partnership with the Australian child and family welfare sector to address these continuing challenges. With representation on the working group of Commonwealth, State and Territory government and non-government representatives who oversee the implementation of the National Framework for Protecting Australia’s Children, the Centre will continue to play a leadership role in this initiative. Centre staff have also formed the expert working group responsible for developing the National Child Protection Research Agenda that sits under the framework.