This paper is based on the latest findings of the Children's Bureau of Australia recently released study entitled Particular Care Reconsidered by Barbara Szwarc. The Study, being a follow-up to the 1979 Report by N.J. Smith and G. Gregory entitled Particular Care was based on an Australia wide survey conducted in June 1984 on all children living in Non-Government Childrens Homes and Foster Care. Particular concentration in the study has been given to children in disadvantageous positions.

Also referred to in this paper is another report by Barbara Swarcz on A Study Into The Victorian Children's Aid Society Respite Care Program During the 1985-86 Holiday Period. This report was based primarily on the perceptions of parents of the children who used the program.

Of particular concern in this paper is the amount of undue injustice and inequality that such children and their families suffer just because their children are disabled.

Child welfare agencies and workers are often so besieged by pressures from all sides that they may lose sight of their purposes. They may mistake their current programs for their reasons for being. Daily activities in agencies are frequently determined by crises in the lives of societally unintegrated children and youth. They may be called neglected and/or abused, disturbed and/or deliquent. What they tend to have in common, whatever label they are given, is that they are somehow peripheral to their society, undervalued by it, and often victimized. Is it any wonder that children and youth become alienated, feeling unbelonging and depressed? Or that there are high staff turnover, under-funding and organizational emergencies in agencies mandated to provide primarily remedial (after-the-pain) services? Under these circumstances, practitioners have little opportunity to review the assumptions, as well as the effects of their daily work.

The agency described here works with low-functioning excluded families. Members of these families often cannot perform ordinary family tasks, and one of the agency's aims is to assist development in these areas. This article reports an attempt to use some principles of adult learning theory with a group of women who meet regularly in a social/educational setting.

Child Protection and Family Support. These are two aspects of our work in family and children's services that have been much discussed over recent years. Can you protect a child whilst at the same time purport to support the family? Should the two functions be organisationally and structurally separated? Are they really just parts of the continuum of care and commitment which we all share in families and children? These and other similar questions have been frequently repeated during the first half of the 80's as we all searched for ways to meet the obvious deficiencies in the networks of families and children's services that had been established. But as we look to the remainder of the 80's there a number of critical issues which are well indentified but which we have yet to really come to grips with.