The Permanency Support Program (PSP) was introduced in New South Wales in October 2017 as a major reform for the State’s child protection and out-of-home care (OOHC) system, focused on achieving permanent care arrangements for children within a two-year timeframe.

This report presents findings from a three-year evaluation of the Permanency Support Program.

The evaluation team recognises there are numerous structural challenges to reforming the NSW child protection system, many of these common to other jurisdictions. These include the fact that service system resourcing – practiced within a context of significant latent and unmet demand – is weighted toward acute, intensive, and expensive services. There is limited resourcing to effectively intervene early, and ideally at a child’s first presentation to a service, and this has significant unintended consequences for children and families.

In this report, the researchers present and describe the evidence suggesting that, while there has been a service shift toward permanency and some limited improvement in outcomes, PSP experienced significant implementation challenges and failed to demonstrate the larger positive impact on children that Department of Communities and Justice intended through this reform effort.