ARACY

Question 1 – How have you adapted service delivery in response to the bushfires, floods and Coronavirus pandemic? When has it worked and when hasn’t it worked? How will this affect how you deliver services in the future? Have your service adaptations included better integration with other initiatives?

ARACY has worked closely with partners to capture and promote the learnings of COVID-19. Out Knowledge Acceleration Hub, developed in partnership with UNICEF Australia, provides the latest and most relevant information relating to the impact of COVID-19 on children and young people to support decision-makers. It also captures and promotes service adaptations across the child and family field. ARACY further published in 2020 Principles for Rapid Adaptation, to support services who needed to rapidly pivot or adapt their services to ensure they captured the learnings and monitored the impact of their service changes.

Question 2 – Are the proposed key outcomes for the families and children programs the right ones? Are there any major outcomes missing? How can we include strengths-based outcomes that focus on family or child safety?

It is incorrect to characterise ARACY’s The Nest as only a population-level framework. The Nest operates successfully at all levels from population to individual. An important part of ARACY’s consultancy work is assisting services to develop indicator pathways and tools to aggregate the progress of individual clients into service level impact measures that can be used for service improvement and reporting impact to funders.

For this reason we believe it is unnecessary to develop a different framework to perform the same function. The Nest is widely used, including in other key DSS initiatives such as Stronger Places, Stronger People. This discussion paper asks providers to consider how they can better work with such initiatives. Using a consistent framework and outcomes would be an excellent place to start.

Developing an additional framework will actively disadvantage those service providers who have already invested in developing pathways and tools based on The Nest, and those who are already required to report through Stronger Places, Stronger People and other initiatives using The Nest. The resources required would be better used to develop a consistent indicator pathway focusing on key outcomes that have relevance for the majority of FaC grantees and supporting their capacity to do the service level planning to map their impact up through the pathway.

Question 3 – What tools or training would support you to effectively measure and report outcomes through the Data Exchange Partnership Approach?

ARACY has developed tools for service clients that combine outcomes for individual clients and aggregate these to service impact measures. Developing a similar tool for FaC grantees and aligning this with the Data Exchange Partnership would provide consistent impact data that would enable DSS and services to assess their effectiveness and impact on children and families.

ARACY has developed tools for service clients that combine outcomes for individual clients and aggregate these to service impact measures. Developing a similar tool for FaC grantees and aligning this with the Data Exchange Partnership would provide consistent impact data that would enable DSS and services to assess their effectiveness and impact on children and families.

ARACY is strongly committed to growing and sharing the evidence base of what works for children in Australia, and works with a range of partners to influence and grow the evidence base at different stages of the research and development process.

We use program logic and/or Theories of Change for all our programs. We believe it to be an essential part of thinking through the purpose, approach and impact of our work. We would recommend it to all service providers and support DSS’s intention to promote this approach.

We recognise that many service providers lack confidence and capability in this area, and would support capacity building efforts to fill this knowledge gap.

Question 5 – If longer-term agreements are implemented, how can the department work with you to develop criteria to measure and demonstrate performance? How can the Data Exchange better support this?

Developing a cohesive set of child and family outcomes with a defined indicator pathway and tools to support aggregation of individual outcomes to service impact measures (as described above) would support a consistent approach to performance measurement and evaluation.

The holistic and flexible nature of The Nest means that a wide range of service providers can not only find their area of impact within the framework, but also identify secondary impacts in other areas and see opportunities for collaboration and joint working. The DSS note in the discussion paper that “the wellbeing of children is impacted by a complex interplay of a wide array of factors – individual, community and societal”. The Nest includes a Bronfenbrenner style ecological aspect, showing how the wellbeing domains operate at the individual, family and community level. This enables services to clearly identify their areas of influence, and also to identify the factors outside their influence or control which nonetheless affect their ability to create change for a child or family. This enables better contextual working and collaboration opportunities.

Question 6 – What does success look like for your service, and how do you assess the overall success of your service?

Please see previous response re developing a cohesive set of outcomes and associated indicator pathway to assist services in measuring and demonstrating impact on children and families.

Question 9 – For all providers, are there other ways to improve collaboration and coordination across services and systems?

The Nest enables a wide range of service providers to not only find their area of impact within the framework, but also identify secondary impacts in other areas and see opportunities for collaboration and joint working.

DSS notes in the discussion paper that “the wellbeing of children is impacted by a complex interplay of a wide array of factors – individual, community and societal”. The Nest includes a Bronfenbrenner style ecological aspect, showing how the wellbeing domains operate at the individual, family and community level. This enables services to clearly identify their areas of influence, and also to identify the factors outside their influence or control which nonetheless affect their ability to create change for a child or family. This enables better contextual working, coordination with other services, and collaboration opportunities. At the systems level, perverse incentives and systemic barriers can be identified and addressed. At the service level, organisations can identify the areas where their intervention can have impact, and the associated factors that a family or child which will support or hinder that impact. At the individual level, practitioners can work with families to identify ways to address these factors outside the service’s remit through collaboration, referral to related services, or self-directed family action.

The discussion paper raises the importance of supporting the ability of local communities to receive relevant data and influence the services being delivered in their local area to ensure service delivery best meets local community needs. ARACY would draw attention to the recent grant by the Australian Research Data Commons to support the development of an Australian National Child Health and Development Atlas (ANCHDA). By a consortium of organisations led by Telethon Kids. This project will build on the data work done by Queensland and Western Australia, among others, to create a data resource that can drill down to SA2 level to support local needs assessment and service planning.

Question 11 – Aside from additional funding, how can the department best work with you to support innovation in your services while maintaining a commitment to existing service delivery?

The best way to support innovation within service organisations is to actively fund for evaluation and core costs. So often core business costs and evaluation activities are deliberately excluded from or minimised in funding. When organisations cannot identify the elements that make a program or intervention successful, there is no evidence base on which to build or experiment. Supporting service organisations by allocating a percentage or allowance for core costs enables an organisation’s capacity to innovate using the data gained through evaluation.

ARACY’s What works 4 Kids website (currently unfunded) provided a comprehensive list of programs which were ranked by their evidence base, supporting wise investment by funders and service providers, and supporting innovation by identifying gaps and opportunities.

A current project, funded by The Ian Potter Foundation, is the first stage of a research agenda for early childhood, the Great to Eight program. This seeks to identify gaps and opportunities, reduce duplication, and assist funders of all kinds to make wise investments throughout the research, development and implementation continuum.