Assessing parental capacity and working with parents is a key practice area in every aspect of child welfare work as it goes to the quality of care that the child is experiencing or will experience. The assessment of parenting capacity is critical in restoration as well as preservation work. This area of practice focus reflects the changing role of NGO caseworkers as they work more closely with families and parents in order to safely prevent removal and to restore children and young people who have entered out-of-home care.
ACWA’s Best Practice Unit two-day forum will explore different views on best practice when working with families and the issues involved in the assessment of parental capacity.
Dates: April 5 & 6
Time: 9:00am – 4:30pm
Venue: Offices of the Advocate for Children and Young People, 219-241 Cleveland Street, Strawberry Hills, Sydney
For: Managers and Team Leaders
Cost: $70 per person
Explore parents’ experience of being assessed and having children restored, the available frameworks and tools in assessing parenting capacity, the role of culture in assessment, family group conferencing and the use of evidence based programs.
In addition to hearing from key stakeholders, practitioners and researchers, we would also like to hear from you. To facilitate this you are invited to use a ‘speed presentation format’ for a maximum of five minutes. You might share a resource, or one aspect of how you have embedded restoration/preservation practice in your team, or pose a question that you think needs attention. Please let terry@acwa.asn.au know if you are interested in presenting for this segment.
Speakers include:
- Prof Elizabeth Fernandez, UNSW – Author of Pathways to Permanency
- Kate Alexander, FACS – Executive Director, Office of the Senior Practitioner
- Louise Mulroney & Jo Roach, ACWA – Step by Step Assessment Tool Developers
- Jessica Cocks, Life Without Barriers – Churchill Fellow Peer work and parent leadership
- FISH (Family Inclusion Strategies in the Hunter) presentation
- Dea Delaney-Thiele, Oz Child – Using evidence-based programs
- Janette Buckingham & Seini Afeaki – Children’s Court Clinic
- A/Prof Amy Conley Wright (Director) & Dr Susan Collings (Research Fellow), Institute of Open Adoption Studies, University of Sydney – International evidence about practices that support birth parents and carers/adoptive parents to build positive relationships.
Register via our forum web page.