Better supporting families at risk
Project Summary
The Queensland Child & Family Commission (QCFC) works to ensure Queensland’s children and young people are loved, respected and have their rights upheld. The Commission assesses the child protection system’s performance, works to achieve beneficial change, and amplifies the voices of children and their families. But bad outcomes still occur. Why, and how to achieve systemic improvement, was the question posed to Innergise.
What was the opportunity?
Multiple public organisations touch the lives of children and families every day, particularly those suffering hardship. They include schools, welfare agencies, hospitals, the police and youth justice agencies. Each does their best, following established policies and procedures, but often without visibility to what other agencies are doing. So how does this system work as a whole? How does it really support children at risk as well as it needs to? Experience suggested there was a need to resolve some of the most intractable problems that create bad outcomes for the few children the system fails. But what changes would make a genuine difference?
How did we tackle the challenge?
Innergise engaged with senior staff with first hand experience of the various organisations and functions affecting children and families at risk. We tapped into that experience together with data to map the system and its dynamics as it affected children in real life. The mapping of system dynamics was grounded in real recent case studies. This exposed the child welfare system as it really works, in contrast with how the system is supposed to work (as an aggregate of agency policy and procedures).
Points within the system were identified as “high leverage” – people, roles and places where action could have a disproportionate return on effort. That is, good actions could be tremendously beneficial; poor actions could lead to disaster.
Having identified these high leverage points, and particularly those that were dysfunctional, we delved deeper. In particular, we looked into the beliefs that underpin actions, and how they contributed to good or bad outcomes.
What were the results and their impact?
QCFC developed a deeper understanding the system in which they worked, not only in terms of what is known but also how it is known. Insights transcended the policy and operational environment to the criticality of the human experience and what shapes engagement and active disengagement with welfare services.
Critical to improving child and family services is improvement in the relationships between relevant agencies and organisations. Optimising the function of each agency does not necessarily lead to optimisation of the system. And deep seated, long-standing perceptions – based on historical experience – lead some people to avoid the system altogether despite being in need of help.
QCFC are now equipped with a theory of change based on their analysis of how the system works in the real world. It is possible to surgically target effort to break negative repeating patterns of behaviour.
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