This article traces the history of child welfare in Australia, showing the ways in which policies and practices, deriving primarily from Britain, were adopted and adapted in a nation in which jurisdiction was split between colonies/states and further divided, within states, on the basis of race. It argues that child welfare has always been part of the nation-building project, central to national objectives when children could be constructed as future citizens, marginal, and more punitive, when they were more easily understood as threats to social stability. In this first part it examines the history of welfare provision for non-indigenous children in Australia from 1788 to 1939. The second part, to be published in a subsequent issue, will discuss post-war developments in services for non-indigenous children, indigenous child welfare services and the historiography of child welfare in Australia.

A significant challenge for children and young people in care (and for the agencies which supervise their care) is to find ways to ‘have a say’ in the decisions which affect their lives. The aim of this paper is to bring together the results of several recent Australian studies which have explored the views of children and young people in care and to see how well they fit with the views of the adult professionals responsible for their care. This research makes it clear that the practice still lags some way behind the rhetoric and that many children and young people in care are not satisfied with their level of involvement. The main preconditions for facilitating effective participation by children and young people are outlined.

This paper outlines a three-year collaborative research project which aims to involve children and young people, as well as other stakeholders, in exploring strategies to meet the needs of children in care. In this paper we identify some research findings which indicate the importance of children participating in the defining of their needs in care, if these needs are to be responded to more effectively than has been the case in the past. We describe the aims of our three-year project and identify some of the methodological issues of implementing stage one of the project in terms of children’s participation. A conceptual framework is developed to clarify issues related to children’s participation in research and decision making and as a basis for deciding on appropriate research methods to employ in the first stage. Rather than merely outlining the work we have so far undertaken, we have insteadfocussed on reflecting on and analysing the theoretical and methodological challenges to researchers in implementing collaborative and participatory research in decision making with children.

This paper reports some results of a study of practitioners’ perspectives on performance assessment in the field of family support services. Existing empirical work on performance assessment emphasises the perspectives offunders and/or service users. However, practitioners are a key stakeholder in both service delivery and assessment, and consideration of how this group approaches and appropriates performance assessment can maximize its effectiveness, and ensure the incorporation of their practice-based knowledge about service delivery and outcomes. We find that family support workers are committed to understanding the effectiveness of their work, and use a variety of means to attempt to evaluate their own effectiveness. However, these means are rarely systematic, andare unlikely to provide data useful for measures of service economy and efficiency. This may be because their practice consists of processes to which conventional evaluation techniques are ill-suited. The challenge for providers of social services is to find ways to assess the caring work at the heart of their practice in ways which are ‘legible’ to all stakeholders, including government flinders.

This paper sets the context for a review of family preservation and family reunification research by briefly noting the national and international crisis that currently surrounds foster care. It then presents the recent family preservation and family reunification research from the US and Australia. Some of this material is drawn from the book by Maluccio, Ainsworth and Thoburn (2000), ‘Child welfare outcome research in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia’. The decision to focus on the US material stems from the fact that these terms originated there in the 1980s and this is where the major research studies are to be found The final comments focus on the re-emphasis on permanency planning and adoption, at least in New South Wales (NSW), and the implications of this for family preservation and reunification services.

The prevalence and hurtfulness of aggressive actions from peers at school experienced by Australian adolescents was examined with a sample of 652 Year 9 students (mean age 14 years) attending seven secondary schools in Adelaide, South Australia. Kinds of aggressive actions reported were categorised as physical, verbal and relational. In general, boys reported receiving more physical aggression; girls more relational aggression. Although girls tended to report being hurt more by aggressive acts than boys, they were similar in reporting acts of relational aggression, such as exclusion, as more hurtful to them than being subjected to physical aggression. Implications for interventions to reduce aggression in schools are discussed.