Reimagining Social Work in AotearoaOriginally aired on Nine to Noon, Thursday 27 August 2015.
Five thousand children are in the care of the state but a new report by the Children’s Commissioner questions whether they are better off as a result of that intervention. In his first comprehensive review of Child Youth and Family, Russell Wills highlights a lack of monitoring, follow up and reporting, by the agency. Lucy Sandford-Reed is the Chief Executive of the Social Workers Association.
Copyright Radio NZ.
This guest blog post is by Paora Moyle. Paora is a PhD candidate at Massey University investigating the operation of Family Group Conferencing (FGC). FGC was introduced into the New Zealand child protection and youth justice system by the Children Young Persons, and Their Families Act 1989, partly in response to a strong Māori critique of the overwhelming overrepresentation of Māori family/whānau in the child protection and youth justice system. Paora’s personal experience, and her emerging research findings, suggest that all is not well with this internationally acclaimed approach to culturally responsive social work practice.
Paora’s research into this topic led her to engage in several awareness raising activities in Facebook and other social media, including a series of Youtube videos. At the bottom of this post you will find a link to a crowdfunding site inviting you to offer practical support to Paora’s research and work with whānau.
One of the items included in the scope of the current New Zealand government’s review of the Child, Youth and Family services (CYFS) is this one: ‘The potential role of data analytics, including predictive risk modelling, to identify children and young people in need of care and protection’.
Predictive risk modelling (PRM) is a simple and seductive idea. If we can predict with accuracy who is likely to abuse children before they have done so, then we can target services to those families, fulfilling the dual objectives of preventing harm before it occurs, and being uber efficient with taxpayer dollars. Such seductive ideas, especially in an age where access to the ‘big data’ required to attempt such a proposition is viable, are often worth investigating. Enormous datasets can be mined, a large number of variables can be included, and patterns of particular combinations of risk factors for certain populations can be identified. In the case of the proposed Ministry for Social Development (MSD) PRM tool, however, there a number of issues. In particular, the level of accuracy of the PRM tool is overstated, the data it relies on has serious problems, its use as a practice decision-making tool is minimal, it has significant rights implications, and using it to decide who should be offered preventive services may not be any more effective than the current state of affairs (although to be fair this is difficult to ascertain – but needs to be).
This guest blog post is by Mike O’Brien. Mike is an Associate Professor at the School of Counselling, Human Services and Social Work at the University of Auckland and has previously been the Head of the School of Social and Cultural Studies at Massey University. Mike chaired the Alternative Welfare Working Group in 2011. He is a Board member at Te Waipuna Puawai and of the Auckland City Mission and is a member of the Impacts of Poverty and Exclusion policy group for the New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services. He is also the social security spokesperson for the Child Poverty Action Working Group. In this post he discusses the meaning of the “investment approach” in the context of New Zealand government;’ review of Child, Youth and Family Services.
Ann Tolley demonstrates an utter failure to grasp indigenous issues whist being interviewed by Mihingarangi Forbes on Native Affairs.