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Access to early childhood services is widely considered to be an important means of supporting vulnerable children and families. Yet the evidence that access to such services automatically makes a difference for vulnerable families is mixed at best. The growing presence of for-profit early childhood services may have an impact on the sector's capacity to provide the enhanced education and care to those most likely to benefit. What are the current and future possibilities for early childhood services to benefit vulnerable children and families? What resources are required to build the capacity of early childhood settings in supporting vulnerable families, and are these likely to differ between for-profit and not-for-profit settings? This paper will explore these questions using a Benevolent Society project, Partnerships in Early Childhood, funded through the Commonwealth's Stronger Families and Communities Strategy, Invest to Grow, as an illustrative case study. Researchers from the Social Policy Research Centre evaluated the first three years of the project, which involves a number of not-for-profit early education and care providers. The paper describes the implementation of PIEC as an attempt to improve the quality of early education and care services to vulnerable children, and lessons that can be drawn for the future of similar interventions. We conclude that time, support for staff and partnerships between different organisations appear to be critical for the success of these interventions, and that the capacity of for-profit services to provide these resources deserves attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's poverty has long been a central concern for policy makers and policy researchers. The body of extant research conducted and the range of programmatic interventions undertaken by successive governments in this and other countries is extraordinary. Nevertheless, children remain in poverty. Clearly there are many reasons for this, not least of which is the maintenance and intensification of market capitalism with its attendant blatant inequalities. Even so, the moral, political, social and economic imperatives for developing workable responses to children's poverty remain. This paper argues that we, in Australia, should adopt an approach increasingly taken in the UK. Drawing on, among other things, the new sociology of childhood, this approach begins not with the expertise of adult researchers and policy makers, but with that of children. In doing so, the case is made for why children's perceptions and experiences of poverty are key concerns for policy. The paper outlines in theoretical terms why children's voices matter. Invoking the new sociology of childhood and the sociology of identity, a conceptual framework for understanding why policy scholars and makers should carefully attend to the voices of their subjects is sketched - in this case, the subjects are children. Finally, some methodological implications of this for undertaking policy research informed by this approach are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent times, child welfare bureaucracies have been required to redefine their relationship with indigenous communities, particularly in view of the impacts associated with their past interventions within these communities. This process of readjustment has been grounded in the apparent endorsement by child welfare bureaucracies of the principle of indigenous self determination and their declared acknowledgement of the desirability of devolving greater responsibility for decision making about child welfare matters to indigenous communities. This paper suggests that, despite statements to the contrary, the processes and mechanisms employed by child welfare agencies to promote indigenous autonomy have not adequately acknowledged the saliency of indigenous social domains nor have they seriously challenged the precepts of the existing administrative domains that govern child protection interventions. Consequently the processes employed by child protection agencies to develop culturally appropriate services have seldom matched the rhetoric associated with them. It is still the case that indigenous Australians are expected to fit within the current structure of child welfare agencies, and that their expectations should conform with the accepted orthodoxies that govern child protection interventions. This paper seeks to examine the processes by which child welfare bureaucracies have, on the one hand, attempted to re-cast their relationship with indigenous communities, while, on the other hand, maintaining the primacy of their administrative domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anna Yeatman and Joanna Penglase (August 2004) provide a useful review of the literature on ‘Looking After Children’ (LAC), a guided practice system for children living in out-of-home care. In summarising the polarised debate, the authors point to an unresolved situation in which advocates have uncritically adopted individualised care planning, as a way of improving outcomes in child welfare while critics have not offered alternatives for systemic reform. This is an area of troubled social policy and the debate cannot rest here. This paper suggests a number of pressing research questions to be addressed. The urgency of the issues and the characteristics of local service systems mean LAC needs to be evaluated in the Australian context, taking into account the local experience and participation of children, families and their social workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Child protection cases typically involve families struggling through socio-economic hardship. That said, in child protection practice there is a readiness to see the parent as the problem with parent reform or child removal as the preferred remedy. In this paper, the emergence and ongoing legitimacy of this child protection response is traced to the de-politicisation of social inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While services have been assisting women who have been victims of domestic violence for many years, it has only been in recent times, that children exposed to domestic violence have begun to receive attention by service providers as clients in their own right. A number of specialised programs have now been designed to meet the needs of these children by domestic violence services and agencies that have a child protection or child welfare/family support focus. This paper aims to describe the types of programs currently in operation across Australia which cater specifically for the needs of children who have been exposed to domestic violence by analysing programs listed on the Child Abuse Prevention Programs Database developed by the National Child Protection Clearinghouse. A number of suggestions are made with regard to the means by which therapeutic responses and research in this area could be enhanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present approach to welfare reform, as embodied in the Final Report of the Reference Group on Welfare Reform (2000), relies heavily on the rhetoric of 'mutual obligation' and 'welfare dependency' while placing little emphasis on original research and relevant data that might inform and support its reform agenda. In marked contrast are the research-driven policy processes aimed at the alleviation of child poverty that took place during the Hawke-Keating government in the late 1980s. In this paper we illustrate the value of research in relation to two government strategies, the Family Allowance Supplement (FAS) and the Child Support Scheme (CSS), that were instrumental in bringing a significant number of children out of poverty. We suggest that any commitment to further the reduction of child poverty requires resources for ongoing research programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]