Thursday 13 October 2011

Children’s Commissioner welcomes new social work positions

Providing more front line social workers and supervisors is a positive response to the increase in substantiated notifications to Child Youth and Family (CYF) says the Children’s Commissioner, Dr Russell Wills.

“Child Youth and Family have been doing a good job in the initial assessment of our most vulnerable children. This increase in resources will allow them to do sustained work with families where children have been experiencing emotional abuse and neglect”, says Dr Russell Wills.

The Office of the Children’s Commissioner’s report, Children in Care, released in 2010, identifies that social workers have had difficulty balancing their work load to ensure effective and sustained engagement with children in care. The announcement to create 96 new positions in CYF will increase their capacity to engage more effectively with children in care and support their caregivers.

In addition 149 social workers will be placed in decile 1-3 schools.

“Placing social workers in our schools increases the capacity to identify vulnerable children and work with their families to ensure change happens at an early stage. Our work and research on neglect has shown that early intervention is important to ensure the best possible outcomes for our vulnerable children”, says Dr Wills.

“It is important that these social workers will be employed by larger, already on the ground, NGO’s which have the capacity to provide the supervision to ensure that they engage effectively with the families and wh?nau of vulnerable children”.

“The issues facing some of our vulnerable children and families are complex and require sustained work to resolve. Ultimately increasing the capacity for support is good for our children”.

ENDS

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