The Child Aware Local Initiative (CALI) is a national action stemming from the National Framework for Protecting Australia’s Children 2009-2020. CALI is led by a partnership between the Australian Centre for Child Protection and Families Australia with funding provided by the Department of Social Services. CALI largely relies on building and maintaining constructive relationships across the spectrum – with federal, state/territory and local governments; with different kinds of organisations, with all kinds of workers/practitioners and with a wide range of people.

By harnessing local knowledge and resources, CALI supports interested people in a community to address children’s needs. The measure of CALI’s success is in what has been achieved by the six groups of people who committed to take action for children under the CALI banner. This presentation describes how young children’s development and wellbeing was addressed in the Victorian and Queensland sites. Also how the Northern Territory, New South Wales, South Australian and Tasmanian sites went about building child safe environments will be outlined.

Research has consistently demonstrated wide gaps in the academic achievement of children in foster and kinship care compared to children who are not in care. While inequalities in learning and development are evident from the earliest stages of life and tend to exacerbate over time, high quality early education and care can remediate initial difficulties and change pathways through education. However, not all early years experiences are positive. Although there is almost a complete absence of research on the effects of early education for children in care, there are reasons to be cautious about the quality and quantity of early years’ services that foster and kinship care children use within their first year, and potentially two years, of life.

This paper reports results from the Early Childhood in Foster and Kinship Care (ECIFKC) study; an Australian national study undertaken by the University of Melbourne and Berry Street. The quality and quantity of childcare used by ECIFKC children in their first two years of life is compared with same age Australian children. To understand child care decisions, carer reports on why ECIFKC children use, or do not use child care are examined. MANOVA is also used to investigate differences in ECIFKC children who do not use child care, use <15 hours of childcare and who use 15+ hours of childcare per week on child, carer and placement characteristics.

NSW is leading Australia in the development and trial of a framework – the QAF – to reliably and consistently measure individual outcomes for children and young people in statutory out-of-home care and provide this information to caseworkers to drive their practice.

Since presenting at the 2016 Child Aware Conference significant progress has been made and the NSW Department of Family and Community Services, the Parenting Research Centre, Burran Dalai Aboriginal Corporation, Key Assets Fostering NSW and Mackillop Family Services are working in partnership to trial the QAF across three sites in NSW.

This presentation will focus on what we have learnt so far from the implementation trial, including facilitators and barriers, and highlight the collaborative work being undertaken. This includes identifying and integrating valid and reliable wellbeing measures into casework practice, development of self-survey instruments and work to progress the wellbeing domain of cultural and spiritual identity for Aboriginal and culturally and linguistically diverse children and young people.