Roadmap for Reform: Strong Families, Safe Children

Roadmap for Reform: Strong Families, Safe Children is our strategy to transform the child and family system. It focuses on earlier intervention and prevention to reduce vulnerability and equip children and young people to reach their full potential.

The Roadmap aims to make the service system work better for children, families and practitioners to achieve better long-term social outcomes.

We are working with the child and family sector, and Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations (ACCOs) to deliver a service system focused on:

strengthening communities to better prevent neglect and abuse
delivering early support to children and families at risk
keeping more families together through crisis
securing a better future for children who cannot live at home.

The Roadmap forms an important step in the government’s long term response to the Royal Commission into Family Violence.

Pathways to support for children and families

As part of the Roadmap, ‘pathways to support’ model connects the different parts of the child and family system to work together as a single, unified system that is child-centred, family focused and evidence informed.

These new pathways reshape the way services, government and communities connect up with children and families at the centre.

The approach has been designed and tested with Aboriginal and non Aboriginal young people and families, peak bodies, sector leaders and practitioners.

Pathways to support for children and families: priority setting plan 2021-24

The Priority Setting Plan 2021 24 sets out the next stage of long-term changes to shift the child and family system towards the pathways to support model.

The priorities in the Priority Setting Plan 2021-24 will:

shift the system to intervene earlier to improve family functioning, keep children with their families and safely reunify children, with a priority focus on Aboriginal families
build evidence across the system to enable effective services, targeted to the needs of priority groups of children and families
strengthen partnerships between child protection, family violence, sexual assault and child and family services to enable improved experiences and outcomes for children and families
advance Aboriginal self-determination and self-management, including through care and case management of Aboriginal children by ACCOs and Aboriginal-led service offerings.

The plan will be supported by rolling 12-month action plans, to be updated annually over the implementation period from 2021 to 2024.

For more information about the Roadmap for Reform, including the Priority Setting Plan please contact the Quality Improvement System Reform branch at qisr@dffh.vic.gov.au.

For more information on Victoria’s strategy to support kinship, foster and permanent carers, see the Strong carers, Stronger children webpage.

In September 2021, DFFH held a sector briefing on the priority setting plan. This can be viewed below: