Anglicare Victoria

1. Functional Family Therapy- Child Welfare (FFT-CW). FFT’s primary goal is to keep families together, preventing children and young people from entering the out-of-home-care system or reunify them at home wherever it is safe to do so. We aim to strengthen families and increase their skills and decision making through targeted and specialist support. FFT uses a short-term intervention approach with an average of 12 to 20 sessions, over three to five months.
2. Rapid Response.  Rapid Response aims to prevent the placement of children in out of home care by providing a four-week intensive intervention to enable family preservation. The program aims to reduce the immediate risks and concerns within the family to ensure that children can continue to live with their families.
3. Future Pathways. Future Pathways typically provides further support to families for up to 6 months after Rapid Response intervention has occurred. The main aims:

• Support the reunification process of children and young people with their families,
• Support families to identify and implement strategies for ongoing goal achievement, and
• Support families to sustain skills and strategies learnt to ensure a safe and nurturing home environment.

• Parent-infant/child interaction (PII/PCI),
• Home safety, and
• Health

• Likely to experience greater challenges because the child or young person’s development has been affected by the experience of risk factors and/or cumulative harm and/or
• At risk of concerns escalating and becoming involved with child protection if problems are not addressed, and
• Likely to be characterised by:
• Multiple risk factors and long-term chronic needs, meaning that children are at high risk of developmental deficits,
• Children, young people and families at high risk of long-term involvement in specialist secondary services, such as alcohol and drugs, mental health, family violence and sexual assault and homelessness services,
• Cycles of disadvantage and poverty resulting in chronic neglect and cumulative harm,
• Single/definable risk factors that need an individualised, specialised response to ameliorate their circumstances, and/or
• Single/definable risk factors that may need specialised one-off, short-term or episodic assistance to prevent or minimise the escalation of risk.

FFT has four exclusion criteria:

• The young person is not in the home (FFT will accept referrals where the referral child is in the home at least 50% of the time with a view to returning full time)
• Presentation of severe psychiatric illness which is not currently managed (acutely psychotic, homicidal or suicidal)
• Presence of developmental / cognitive delays that would impair parent’s ability to learn new skills.
• Sexual abuse where the offender remains in the home.

• Young parents.
• Parents or children with a learning disability.
• Parents with a history of care.
• Families with multiple vulnerabilities such as social isolation, mental health, substance use and/or family violence.
• Families with multiple reports to Child Protection.

• Families who are at imminent risk of Child Protection issuing a Protection Application by Emergency Care and placing the child in Out of Home Care (Priority one).
• Families who are already Case Managed by Child Protection that are at significant risk of a Breach to their current order, which would result in the child being placed in Out of Home Care (Priority two).