The Families First Pilot Program in the then Outer East metropolitan region of Melbourne began in mid-1991 as an intensive family preservation and reunification service for children on the verge of state care. The service offered was brief (4-6 week), intensive (up to 20 hours per week), home-based and flexible (24 hour a day, 7 day a week availability) and all members of the household or family were the focus of service even though the goals were clearly grounded in the protection of the child. This paper begins with some of the apprehension expressed both in the field and in Children Australia in 1993, and reports upon the now completed evaluation of the pilot, which covered the first 18 months of operation. The evaluation examined implementation and program development issues and considered the client population of the service against comparative data about those children at risk who were not included. The paper concludes that there is room for Families First in the Victorian system of protective and family services and points to several developmental issues.

A recent research study of contracting arrangements In children's servtces In Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Is the basts for this article. Key issues In contracting Including the positive and negative aspects of this approach to service provision for contractors and providers are discussed. Questions are also ratsed about the tmpltcattons of contracting for the traditional differentiation between nongovernment not-for-profit and private for-profit organisations

This article explores the difficulties and joys of older child adoption. While many children and their families grow towards a secure attachment over months or years, this will probably never be of the same intensity as that between parents and their biological children. For some families, the role of loving caretakers may be the best possible outcome for a child with attachment difficulties.

This paper outlines the basic characteristics of intensive family preservation programs which have very recently been introduced into the child welfare systems of most Australian States. Typically these programs have been used to prevent placement or to assist families whose children are being returned to their care. Highly intensive and with 24 hour availability these short-term services draw on a range of theoretical approaches and are delivered in the family's home and natural environment. It is argued that Australia should avoid both the ‘cultural cringe’ and the ‘Tall Poppy Syndrome’ in assessing what intensive family preservation services may have to offer us.

Definitions of competent practice which were developed by a team of child protection workers are reexamined in light of current debates about enterprise competency standards. Such definitions indicate that competence is more aptly analysed in terms of the nature of workers' process objectives and their capacity to work within tensions and contradictions than in terms of listings of specific skills and knowledge.

Recently I was idly leafing through one of our State's educational review magazines. My attention was immediately captivated by a headline which read ‘Students to be empowered as consumers’. ‘At last’, I thought, as I dived in to consume the article, ‘even the education system is going to empower students in their role as consumers of school life’. I'm sure you can imagine my disappointment when I discovered that in fact the education department was introducing a program of teaching students to be good retail consumers. You know the kind - Levis versus Corfu, MacDonald versus Hungry Jacks, Revlon versus Shiseido, Dolly versus Juice, hip versus funk - the type of purchasing traumas we all experience from time to time.

The recent articles (Goddard 1993a; 1993b; 1994), describing in some detail the battle of the woman who refused to ignore the abuse of her child by a school teacher, have provoked a number of telephone calls and letters. A number of people have praised the tenacity and courage of the mother in continuing to battle against the bureaucracy.

One mother has given permission to publish her story of similar experiences in attempting to get the bureaucracy to pay attention to the rights of children to protection. It is of great concern to me that, six years after first writing about this (Goddard 1988), the responses of organisations do not appear to have greatly changed.

Where a staff member is accused of abusing a child, the organisations still appear to be more concerned with protecting themselves rather than protecting the vulnerable children (Hechler 1988).

I would like to take this opportunity to repeat the questions I asked last year: