New South Wales child protection workers have warned that some of the state’s most vulnerable children are being neglected or put at risk of being removed from their families because resourcing problems in the sector have reached crisis point.
More than 2,000 public-sector child protection workers across the state plan to strike for part of the day on Wednesday as they call on the government to give them a pay rise, hire 500 additional staff and de-privatise out-of-home care.
Failures in the system include an explosion in the number of children in out-of-home care being forced to stay in motels and a court finding that the government had failed an Aboriginal boy in foster care whose appendix became infested with worms.
The government’s own data show that only 25,899 – less than a quarter – of the 113,668 children who were reported to the NSW Department of Communities and Justice as being at risk of significant harm in 2023 were seen by a case worker.
The government has conceded that the response rates are indicative of staff shortages. There were 256 unfilled case worker positions across the state as of December.
Wednesday’s strikes follow similar action in Wollongong and the northern rivers, where workers say they have had no office for four months after the shuttering of the Ballina centre due to mould.
A northern rivers case worker, who requested anonymity to speak about the situation, said staff had been “leaving in droves” and there were only two case workers in Ballina available to respond to new risk-of-harm reports.
“We are tied to the computer so much,” they said. “It’s a struggle to get out to see children. We’re treated like numbers. We started buying our own stationery recently because even that has not been organised.”
The privatisation of the state’s out-of-home care system coupled with staff attrition problems meant workers couldn’t keep up with “unrealistic” pressures to meet their targets.
“It’s appalling the state the department is in,” the worker said. “We need children in out-of-home care to be in safe hands.”
Nin Bennett, a child protection worker in Newcastle, said working conditions had deteriorated in the past two years and her colleagues were struggling with unsustainable caseloads of between 12 and 19 children.
“Each day I feel more and more deflated … I guess the easiest way to explain it is I leave visits not feeling as though I’m not actually helping [the children] or making a difference,” said Bennett, speaking as a union delegate.
Buoyed up by the success the teachers’ and paramedics’ unions had in securing pay rises after the election of the Minns Labor government, the Public Sector Association is calling for a $10,000 raise for entry-level child protection workers.
Wednesday’s strike comes a month after the NSW children’s court handed down a judgment that found the government had “failed” a six-year-old Aboriginal boy and his three younger siblings during the six years they spent in its care.
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The boy, who had spent more than half of his life in out-of-home care, went through a revolving door of foster carers, including 26 households in one year. His appendix had to be removed after it became infested with worms.
The children’s magistrate found the government “not only failed to protect the children from harm but has caused harm to the children”.
The families minister, Kate Washington, has ordered an “urgent” review of NSW’s out-of-home care system including how taxpayer money is being spent by the private providers who are in charge of organising foster care and group homes.
The review was announced after NSW’s advocate for children and young people released a report about young people placed into emergency accommodation such as hotels after being removed from their families.
One young person said their experience made them feel like a “dog being moved from cage to cage”. There were 427 children in “high cost emergency arrangements” at the end of March, according to the government.
The government has said these arrangements can cost more than $2m a year for every child, whereas a child in foster care costs the state at most $74,000 a year.
Labor has blamed the Coalition for the state of child protection in NSW. Washington has acknowledged that the system is “broken”.
“A critical element of our reform will involve the attraction and retention of caseworkers,” she said on Tuesday.
The minister said caseworkers had gained a significant pay increase after the government scrapped the Coalition’s public-sector wages cap but she was in fresh discussions with their union.