PSA Media Release Header

11 October 2012

More than a money- go-round needed to support vulnerable children

The Public Service Association is asking how the government intends to pay for new measures to protect vulnerable children when there appears to be no commitment to providing extra funding or resources.

The White Paper on Vulnerable Children plans to introduce a database for at-risk children, a Child Protect phoneline, more training for professionals and local multi-disciplinary children’s teams.

The PSA welcomes a more joined-up approach to protecting vulnerable children but says it can’t happen without extra money and resources.

“The White Paper talks about shifting funding around to services based on known effectiveness. That signals that money will simply be moved from one agency to another which could have a major impact on some current services and budgets,” says PSA National Secretary Richard Wagstaff.

“There will clearly be a very large IT component to all of this with new, shared information system, but there is nothing to suggest that extra funding or resources will be put in to support it. It could exacerbate already heavy workloads for social workers and chronic underfunding of community and voluntary providers who work in this sector.”

The PSA says the people who will work to implement these new measures will have a lot of questions about how they will work at an operational level.

“It’s important that the agencies and staff involved have confidence in these new measures. For that to happen they will need more detail on how things will work in practice and assurances that they will have adequate support and resources to deal with new systems and do their jobs,” Richard Wagstaff says.

ends

© Scoop Media