Around 40,000 children are estimated to require out-of-home care in Australia and this number has risen every year over the past decade (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2014a). Young people up to 18 years who are unable to live with their birth families are placed in different forms of out-of-home care, including kinship care...

Summary: Across the English-speaking world, child protection authorities are increasingly placing children with extended family rather than in foster care or residential care. Many more children are in such arrangements informally. A number of surveys of kinship carers have been conducted in recent years in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. This paper systematically...

In some jurisdictions of Australia, the rate of Indigenous children in foster, kinship and residential care on any one night has reached almost one in ten. This rate is almost ten times higher than non-Aboriginal children and has steadily increased over the past decade. Contrast this with rates of non-Indigenous children in out-of-home care, which...

Kinship care refers to the care provided by relatives or members of the child’s social network when a child is unable to live at home with their parents, and is the preferred placement option within the Child Protection System.

This presentation is about a study exploring child protection practitioner decision-making about the placement of children in out-of-home care. A brief measure, 'the child placement questionnaire' was developed. Following evaluation by experts in child protection research, policy and practice, it was piloted with 53 child protection practitioners working in the Australian out-of-home care sector. Responses...