The alleged involvement of two 13-year-old boys in a triple fatal car crash in Maryborough last week has once again raised questions about the standard of care for some of Queensland’s most vulnerable children.
Residential care is one of three types of out-of-home care used in Queensland, but it's widely regarded as the least desirable due to its high relative cost and lack of individual programs for each child.
Lisa Griffiths, the chief executive of non-profit child welfare group OzChild, says a better alternative exists that's been successful in the US, Scandinavia and the United Kingdom.
OzChild is already running the Treatment Foster Care Oregon (TFCO) program in multiple states, including Queensland, which aims reunite children with their birth family, where possible.
And so far, it looks like the program is working.
Six teams are up and running across the country with 73 per cent of children staying in the program for the entire duration, according to OzChild.
Of the 75 children that have graduated from the program, 95 per cent are no longer in residential care.
About one third of those children are back with their family of origin, another third is with kin and the remainder are in long term foster care.
How does it work?
In Queensland, OzChild has two teams providing the short-term program, which normally runs between six and 12 months.
The two teams care for seven children aged between 7 and 11.
Unlike residential care, children are placed within carers' own homes.
The program is heavily structured and tailored to the individual child, who is given a clinical care team who also work with the family of origin.
"A child therapist [who] works intensively with the child or young person. A family therapist that works with the young person's family. We have a teacher [who] works intensively with them around their educational needs, and we have skills coaches that work on their developmental capabilities and their pro-social behaviours," Dr Griffiths said.
"It's teaching the young person how to better utilise their time, identify the right peers to associate with, and the sorts of things that young people should be doing, as opposed to some of the most-tragic circumstances where we're having offending behaviours."
Dr Griffiths said carers are full-time and cannot hold another position of employment, however, it does attract higher compensation than foster carers are entitled to.
"This particular model has a much-higher carer allowance because of the nature of the program itself and the time commitment needed by the carer," she said.
What's wrong with residential care?
Queensland has the highest number of children in residential care in all states and territories.
Currently 1,582 children are in residential care in Queensland, more than double the number in New South Wales -- 706 -- despite that state's higher population.
In the last five years, numbers have surged.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Queensland Family and Child Commission said the number of children entering out-of-home care had increased by 24.7 per cent since 2017-18.
"The number placed in residential care has almost doubled, following a steady increase over the past decade."
"These are concerning trends, given residential care homes do not offer a stable, family-like setting found in foster or kinship-care homes."
For experts, what's extremely concerning is the age of children residing in these group homes.
Figures provided in a parliamentary question on notice indicate that more than 700 children between the ages of 10 and 14 were in Queensland residential care homes as of June 30 last year. Another 26 were below the age of 4.
Tom Allsop, the chief executive of Peak Care, Queensland's peak child protection body, said urgent change was needed to reduce the number of children in residential care.
"The entire sector is under strain with more and more children in need of protection every year."
"We need more funding, more staff, more carers, more early intervention, more children in foster and kinship care and less children in residential care."
What impact does this have on children?
Children removed from their families have generally experienced either abuse or neglect. In residential care, those children are placed with other children who have also experienced trauma to varying degrees.
Dr Griffiths said residential care homes often have four or more children of different genders, ages and backgrounds living under the same roof.
"You can imagine that if you've got four children that have never met before … coming from very different family backgrounds, with various levels of trauma being thrown together, with fairly inexperienced staff [who] don't know how to provide a clinical, therapeutic, specialist response," she said.
"It really is staff coming and going, coming in and out of children's lives, so there's very little stability around what normality is and, more often than not, these kids don't go to school."
What about the cost?
The current residential care system costs Queensland taxpayers an average of $469,093 per child per year: That's $1,285 per child every day.
Dr Griffiths said the TFCO model created better outcomes for children at almost half the price.
"It costs, on average, about $583 a day and, if you compare that to residential care, which can go up to $2,300 a day sometimes," she said.
It's not a program that can be set-up overnight, but establishing an additional eight teams across the state would not take as long as some might think.
"It would take us four months to recruit the staff, six months to recruit the carers and we would start receiving children straight away, so by 12 months we'd have at least half of the program places filled and then, within 18 months, you'd have them all filled," Dr Griffiths said.
Dr Griffiths says money is better spent supporting children before they turn to crime.
The Queensland government is planning to spend $332 million into a raft of initiatives and law reforms to tackle youth crime -- including two new youth detention centres.
Dr Griffiths said time was of the essence.
"When you're seeing residential care numbers increase, year on year, at 20 per cent [annually], the fastest growing rate, and you're not seeing anything decrease anywhere else, it just means that you're in for a world of hurt for the next number of years," she said.
"Even if we were able to scale up TFCO … it's going to be quite a number of years before turning the tide in Queensland."
