The city headquarters of the Department for Education and Child Development, which includes Families SA.

The state’s embattled child protection agency, Families SA, does not have the funding capacity to investigate more than two thirds of the serious child abuse or neglect notifications it receives each year.

Information obtained exclusively by InDaily lays bare the catastrophic extent of chronic underfunding of an agency whose recent failures have bedevilled the Weatherill Government.

A senior departmental whistleblower, who cannot be named, has told InDaily more than half the almost 20,000 potentially serious notifications received each year are “administratively closed” without any action taken.


Many more are farmed out to other agencies and charities. Fewer than one in three are actually investigated by department case-workers.

“It’s a constant juggling act,” the source said.

“The local supervisor and manager have to decide on a daily basis which traumatic event they’re going to deal with and which one they’re not.

“They have to decide which is the most serious, and that’s just out of what’s in front of them on the day … some days there’s no capacity to deal with even the most serious things.”

The latest annual report from the Department of Education and Child Development suggests the number of notifications the agency receives is exponentially growing: in 2012-13 it received 37,434, a 6.1 per cent increase on the previous year. Of these, 19,120 were “screened-in” notifications – those the department determines warrant a “reasonable suspicion” that a child is at risk.

But only 5333 of those were investigated. According to InDaily’s source, around 10,000 were administratively closed without further response, as a matter of policy.

The case of Chloe Valentine, details of which shocked the state when they were raised in a coronial inquiry, was consistently deemed to be on the lower end of the scale in terms of the required response.

“Quite frankly, most of the time her case didn’t actually fit into that 5400 (investigated cases),” InDaily has been told.

Even in hindsight, her predicament was deemed “less serious, and consistently less serious” than thousands of other cases facing the thinly-stretched agency.

Instead, the Valentine case was “referred to in the log as an ‘alternative response’”, which variously meant outsourcing the case to the Salvation Army or assigning a student worker to visit the family.

This response clearly rankled state coroner Mark Johns, whose final recommendation of last month’s damning report was for “a mandatory restriction on student social workers … having client contact without direct supervision by a senior social worker”.


He also recommended the agency’s Crisis Response Unit be “reviewed with a view to determining whether it has sufficient resources”. On the information received by InDaily, such a review would yield a clear-cut response.

“The resource paucity does create an environment where the staff become, as a defence mechanism, desensitised,” the source said.

“The staff out there have an overly optimistic assessment on everything – they’d go bonkers if they didn’t … knowing they would not do anything with more than two-thirds of them, that would just bring them unstuck.”

According to notes prepared by the departmental insider, services are sometimes “spread too thinly” to counteract the lack of funding to address the majority of cases.

“This means in some cases a service is provided but not to a sufficiently high standard,” the document states.

“Another consequence of this resource-constrained environment is that staff who only see the most extreme cases (the less than one in three that actually get investigated) become desensitised to the seriousness of less serious abuse and neglect.

“For these reasons the fury that has been directed at individual staff within Families SA is misplaced; the problems that face Families SA today are the terrible consequences of 20 years of less than optimal funding for child protection in SA.”

The document argues that unless funding shortfalls are addressed “it is not realistic to expect even the most sensible and obvious recommendations for improvement to be properly implemented”.

“The Government will say Families SA had $90 million of funding a year and now it’s $340 million,” the document’s author told InDaily.

“But most of that has gone into the out-of-home-care system; very little has gone into frontline investigation and virtually none into intensive family support services … We’re the lowest spenders in that space.”

The source argues “community expectations about this stuff have changed” as “the world has moved to a really, really different place”.

“The Department should have been moving to a different place as well, but wasn’t funded to do it,” they said.

“The whole system has had the dial turned up on it for 20 years, so it’s been progressively deteriorating.”

However, throwing money blindly at the system would similarly fail to improve it, as “you could pump $100 million in and the Department wouldn’t be able to spend it”.

“It’s a seven to 10-year process to build it back up.”

InDaily asked Education and Child Development Minister Susan Close whether the Government considered Families SA adequately funded, and she replied with this statement: “We have established a Royal Commission into Families SA which will, among other things, consider this question.

“However, Families SA’s budget has grown dramatically over the time of this Government, increasing from just $90m to over $300m.”

Help our journalists uncover the facts In times like these InDaily provides valuable, local independent journalism in South Australia. As a news organisation it offers an alternative to The Advertiser, a different voice and a closer look at what is happening in our city and state for free. Any contribution to help fund our work is appreciated. Please click below to donate to InDaily. Donate here Powered by PressPatron

Share Linkedin Email