Getting to Count: The Looking After Children (LAC) Initiative

Abstract

Historically, children in ‘out-of-home’ care have been at risk of institutional neglect, abuse, and abandonment in ways that tragically com¬pound the difficulties they may have experienced in their family of origin. In context of a general shift away from institutional to community based services, children and young people who are administratively assessed as needing out-of-home care services are today placed mostly in foster or kin care settings.

You know you cannot take for granted that just because a child comes into care, this is going to make things better. [There has been] a considerable shift over the last couple of decades in out of home care. There was an assumption that if you took a child into care and because they were having a problem at home, that you … were doing them a great favour. Longitudinal research is telling us [this is not so]. So LAC is … designed to ask … you to review things at set places. It’s asking you to include people who know the child best. And this is quite revolutionary you know. … it really confronts people, this sharing of information … [T]here’s little revolutions going on all over the place because of LAC … When it’s used as it’s intended, it actually gets people talking together who … are not routinely [involved]. Oftentimes, parents and carers, and even the child themselves, are excluded from care planning … And so plans often times fail… [There] is no point sending this child to this particular school, they went there two years ago, they had a really bad run, it’s the same principal, this is setting this child up to fail … Now if [the worker does] not have this information … they may have the best of intentions … but when you’re making decisions around care planning you need to include the people who know the child best (Jude Morwitzer, Program Manager, The LAC Project Australia, interview data, Sydney, March 2003).