Background: A deficit-oriented discourse dominates child protection workforce research with worker distress including burnout and vicarious trauma predominating. Recent Australian research challenges this discourse through new understandings of worker resilience, with potential benefits for service quality and workforce retention, warranting consideration of this alternative lens.
Objective: This Australian longitudinal, qualitative study explored child protection worker perceptions and experiences of resilience to inform understandings of worker resilience, and implications for worker functioning and workforce retention.
Participants and setting: Participants were a purposive sample of 24 front-line child protection workers, in seven locations, from the state-based statutory child protection agency in Queensland, Australia.
Methods: Using semi-structured, in-depth interviews, this longitudinal, qualitative study utilised a reflective approach drawing on participant understandings and experiences. The thematic analysis via NVivo utilized theory informed a priori coding as sensitizing concepts, which was further developed through inductive coding drawing meaning from participant data.
Results and conclusion: With resilient workers maintaining effective practice over extended periods, findings highlighted the importance of reflective practice and relationship-based approaches to well-being and retention. Support for these practice approaches through supervision, peer support, and the organization were significant contributors. Participant-identified influences on resilience informed a relational-reflective framework, which recognizes the significance of reflective practice and the relational context to resilience, and how this is experienced. Given the common deficit-oriented discourse of worker distress in child protection, this study and the framework presented have relevance for workers, managers and organizations by reconceptualizing how resilience can be promoted to further workforce retention.

As this is a private report, the abstract has not been made visible.

Children who are placed in out-of-home care have experienced abuse and/or neglect and as a result may have a history of trauma, attachment disorders, intellectual disability, poor physical, mental and dental health, self-harming behaviours and/or substance misuse. The philosophical approach to child protection practice gives preference to family reunification to either parents or kin for these children where possible. The significant shortage of foster carers, particularly the shortage of Indigenous foster carers for Indigenous children, combined with the need to prevent another Stolen Generation, has resulted in greater attempts to return these children to their kin. The increased recognition of Indigenous perspectives on health and well-being that involve not just physical health but connection to Country and the environment, connection to family and community, sense of Indigenous identity and culture is also necessitating more than just a medical focus on the needs of these children. However, reunification of Indigenous children often means they are being returned to their kin in rural and remote communities where there are scarce health services. This situation presents many difficulties for kin carers particularly those who are caring for children with a disability and those whose psychosocial adjustment has been detrimentally affected by cumulative harm as a result of further abuse while in care. Many of these children have been previously placed with carers in regional towns where there has been access to specialist health services. It these very services which sometimes object to children being moved to live with kin out of a concern about whether adequate medical follow care will be available. This paper will present two case studies which identify some of the complexities of meeting the health care needs of children returned to kin in rural and remote communities along with some suggestions for how these children's wellbeing can be better monitored.

The Youth Strategic Plan provides a clear strategic direction to guide and focus the manner in which Council, service providers and the broader community support and empower our young people. The Youth Strategic Plan seeks to:
•Guide and focus the community's collective work with and for young people
•Ensure that best-practice support and services are delivered for young people
•Utilise a strong evidence base to help the community better meet the needs and aspirations of our young people
•Ensure that young people are actively engaged and that the community is responsive to their needs
•Outline how young people will be empowered to participate in community life

A common discourse used when educating social work professionals is the need to understand and develop strategies for self-care. This is often prompted to counter the potential risk to students and professionals who experience stress, vicarious trauma and burnout through practice experiences. Despite a significant body of research which goes to these risks, it nonetheless indicates the majority of social workers do not succumb to these impacts but instead experience high job satisfaction. Self-care is important as social workers are exposed to complex and difficult circumstances and human distress when working. Yet, there is value in moving the discourse from an individualised, deficit-oriented focus on self-care to reduce risk, to one of developing a broader concept of resilience that is embedded within the organisational culture and which allows students and professionals to work through and overcome the adversity faced in practice. A recent study of child protection workers provides some key messages to inform the development of resilience from the early stages of practice, including field education, through to advanced practice situations.

Educational achievement can be impacted by a range of factors such as social determinants of health, socioeconomic and social disadvantage, family circumstances, mental health, and social skills. While teachers are often concerned about these issues, their responsibility is the education of students, and their ability to provide individual support to students is limited.
Social work practitioners are well placed to work in school settings to support and assist children who face socio-economic and educational disadvantage and thereby facilitate the ability of children to better engage in education. Social workers are able to implement strategies with individuals, student groups, staff, and community members, which contribute to the educational process and student engagement. School social work is internationally recognized with social workers operating in schools in many countries. In Australia, some school settings have social workers, but this is limited and not consistent across the country.
Field education or practicum experience is regarded as a significant element of the pedagogy in social work professional education. Given the recognition of school social work, a school-based field education practicum can be a valuable learning context for social work students. The University of New England social work program recognized the value of this learning context and, as a regional university, the particular disadvantage faced by students in rural areas. In response a Social Work in Schools field education program was developed.
This paper discusses a case study of a social work field education program that has promoted the introduction of the social work role in rural schools in Australia, where there are few social workers. This program has seen strong support from schools and social work students, which had resulted in rapid expansion of the program and benefits to schools and their students.

High rates of child protection reports in a regional local government area provided impetus for seeking better engagement with youth and community that would inform the council's youth strategic plan and community responses. This approach was seen as a step to address social issues relevant to youth and reduce child protection demand in the area.
The regional local government area was created in 2016 through merger of three smaller disparate local government areas. High needs, low socio-economic status, increasing child protection service demand, and limited cohesion and coordination due to previous funding arrangements based on past local government boundaries, were identified as contributing factors to youth issues in the area. The council was identified as key stakeholder and lead organisation by the state child protection agency. The council sought to enhance its coordination role with community agencies and build a more cohesive service network across the various communities. The state child protection agency was working with council to enhance local responses to identified needs, including targeted child protection, family support and youth services. To achieve this the council sought to undertake an independent consultation process that would engage with community, services, and importantly youth, to inform future planning and improved responses to youth needs.
This presentation will discuss the consultation and youth engagement process used and key findings that informed local government and local service strategic planning. The lessons from this process may be relevant to other regions in the development of youth strategic/action plans and community responses where high rates of child protection issues have been identified.

Based on recent Australian research, this presentation rebuffs the common deficit-oriented discourse of worker distress and dysfunction in challenging social work contexts, and in so doing, argues the relevance of a relational-reflective model for the development and maintenance of a resilient workforce. Whilst the benefits of relationship-based and reflective approaches have long been identified and promoted in social work practice, this can be challenging in social work contexts such as child welfare, where managerialism, highly emotive content, and exposure to adversity and trauma are prevalent. While there are inherent complexities and adversity in the work, many practitioners even in fields of practice such as child welfare, continue to focus on relational aspects of the work, engage in reflection and maintain high quality and effective practice.
A recent Australian longitudinal qualitative study exploring resilience in child welfare workers provided significant insights regarding the importance of both relationship-based approaches and reflective practice to staff wellbeing and retention. The support for relationship-based and reflective practice approaches through supervision, peer support, and the organisational context were significant contributors to this. Even when client engagement was difficult, using relationally focused approaches was important to workers. The relational-reflective model of resilience presented, offers an alternative to the common discourse of burnout, vicarious trauma, and worker distress and dysfunction, and is offered as a model to instead facilitate the development and maintenance of resilience in practitioners, and workforce retention. Given a discourse of worker distress not only in child welfare but other social work contexts, this study and the model presented have relevance across many fields of practice.

Research over the past two decades has identified the perceptions of service users, mainly parents, engaged with the child protection system (Buckley 2017; Buckley et al. 201 la; De Boer and Coady 2007). This chapter extends this understanding to consider the experiences within the prevailing child protection discourse of all key stakeholders including families, children, foster carers and child protection practitioners. It will demonstrate that despite an overall positive aspiration to promote the welfare of children, the current approach fails to respond to the diverse needs and difficulties of the population and inadvertently alienates many of those who need assistance to prevent further escalation of their difficulties. The first part of the chapter outlines the type of system required to promote children's safety and well-being and demonstrates the conflicting values underpinning child protection processes that operate in most of the English speaking world. It then examines the way that children and young people experience services that are set up to help them, and their ideal view of how child protection would work best for them. Children that live in care are exceptionally dependent on the quality of social care and social work. Therefore, we examine the interface between current child protection practice and the out-of-home care (OOHC) system, exploring ideas about how the quality of care can be enhanced within a different policy framework.
Without question, a relationship-based approach is key to effective practice and the achievement of this is dependent on a stable and positively disposed workforce that can work collaboratively to gain trust and motivate families in the interests of their children's welfare. In Anglophone countries, the adversarial nature of statutory child care, highlighted by court processes, is known to challenge the ability of child protection staff to operate according to the principles of their profession, hence the high rate of disillusionment and turnover in statutory social work in particular. The chapter concludes by considering the aspects of the current system that are the most detrimental to good practice and by outlining how a public health model would, by addressing each of the domains discussed here, better meet the needs of children and families.