What children in care need from Australia’s reform agenda

As I heard the news this week that a teenage girl living in residential care in Queensland had died following a suspected drug overdose, I kept coming back to the thought that we cannot allow the death of another child in care to become simply another tragic headline. 

There will rightly be an investigation into what happened and it is important not to pre-empt that process. But for those of us who work closely with carers, children and young people across Australia, news like this lands heavily and reinforces the urgency of turning reform commitments into real change. 

Queensland has one of the highest levels of reliance on residential care in the country and its recent Child Safety Commission of Inquiry has already laid bare many of the pressures facing the system. 

The Queensland Government has committed to significant reform, including reducing reliance on residential care, improving support for foster and kinship carers and moving young children out of residential settings. 

Those commitments matter and last week’s National Child Protection Week call to move from conversation to action is a timely reminder that the real test is what happens next. 

There are a number of instances where children and young people need temporary therapeutic residential interventions. However, these should be a time-limited exception in the case plan for a child’s therapy and not a stop gap in place of finding a child a safe, supported family-based home. 

Through my role as Chair of the National Foster & Kinship Care Collective, I work closely with carer representative organisations across the country, including Queensland Foster and Kinship Care. 

While every jurisdiction operates differently, the conversations are remarkably consistent. 

Carers are supporting children with increasingly complex needs while navigating financial pressure, system complexity and demands on their families. 

At the same time, governments need more foster and kinship carers and desperately need the carers already providing homes to stay. 

We cannot recruit our way out of this problem if we are not first retaining and properly supporting the people who have already stepped forward to care for children in their homes. 

Moving from conversation to action means ensuring carers have financial support that covers the real costs of caring.  

It means timely therapeutic support, resources, training and access to the services children require, including a part-time carer network around them to provide extended family support. It means treating carers as genuine members of a child’s care team and listening when they say a carer home is under pressure. 

Because supporting carers is ultimately about supporting children.  

Every stable placement means greater continuity in relationships, school, community and identity. 

Every carer home breakdown risks another disruption for a child who may already have experienced far too many. 

Action must also start earlier.

We need to keep investing in prevention, early intervention and family preservation so fewer children reach the point where they need to enter care in the first place. 

Where it is safe and possible, children should remain connected to family, kin, culture and community. Where they cannot safely remain at home, we need strong family-based options and timely decisions about permanency. 

What struck me most reading the news this week was that none of this is abstract. 

Behind every policy, inquiry and reform agenda is a child.

And behind every foster or kinship placement is a family making room in their lives for that child. 

Queensland has undertaken a major inquiry. The evidence has been heard and a reform agenda has been set. These are not Queensland issues alone. 

Across Australia, governments have an opportunity to demonstrate what moving from conversation to action really looks like. 

That means asking whether we are investing enough in the families who provide care, whether children are receiving the stability they need and whether residential care is being used because it is genuinely the right model for a young person or because the system has run out of other options. 

National Child Protection Week may have finished for another year, but its message should stay with us. 

The work is not in continuing to identify the problems. It is in acting on what we already know and building child protection systems that give children safety, stability, connection through a stable family home and a genuine sense of belonging.