Oranga Tamariki not meeting minimum care standards five years on

A new report from the Independent Children’s Monitor shows tamariki and rangatahi in care of the state are still not receiving the minimum standards of care – and have never done so since the introduction of the current monitoring framework five years ago.

Meanwhile, the number of children and young people abused in care has increased, with 507 children (nine percent of all kids in care) found to have been abused or neglected while in Oranga Tamariki care in the 2023/24 year.

The fourth Experiences of Care in Aotearoa report, released by Aroturuki Tamariki – Independent Children’s Monitor on Wednesday, shows Oranga Tamariki (as the legal guardian of almost 99 percent of kids in care) continued to fail to meet the needs of the country’s most vulnerable children.

This was despite the Government, its agencies, and community care providers now having access to the findings of the landmark Royal Commission of Inquiry, which laid bare the horrific abuse, neglect and lifelong impacts suffered by generations of Kiwi kids.

But in the same year the final report of the royal commission was released, more than 500 children were abused or neglected while in the custody of Oranga Tamariki. 

Disproportionate levels of abuse continued to occur in youth justice facilities and when children returned to their parents’ care. 

In these secure residences, 18 percent of the harm was caused by residence staff and 79 percent by other rangatahi. Examples included organised fights, and “premeditated group assaults on a targeted young person”.

While young people were more likely to be abused by another young person, the number of findings of abuse by kaimahi (workers) in residences nearly doubled in the past year from 24 to 41. Emotional abuse and neglect by kaimahi included failure to protect rangatahi “from alleged organisational fighting’” and verbal threats.

When it came to staff abusing children, examples included “kaimahi using excessive force including punches, hits to the head, and rangatahi ‘getting the bash’.”

During the 2023/24 reporting period, the Independent Children’s Monitor made four reports of concern following disclosures of harm.

For tamariki and rangatahi returned home to the care of a parent while in the custody of Oranga Tamariki, 11 percent were abused or neglected. 

While the risks of harm in care were well-known, key safety factors – including regular visits from social workers – were not being prioritised, according to the report.

“When the state takes custody of a child, its job is to care for and protect them,” Independent Children’s Monitor chief executive Arrun Jones said.

“Oranga Tamariki is not alone, all government agencies need to see themselves as guardians of these children and make sure they are safe, well cared for, and have their needs met.”

In response to the report’s findings, Chief Children’s Commissioner Claire Achmad said urgent action was needed from all agencies to ensure all children in care were safe.

In his “unreserved apology” offered to survivors in November, Christopher Luxon said the abuse and neglect they suffered was “horrific”.

“It was heartbreaking. It was wrong. And it should never have happened.”

Achmad said the findings showed abuse of children in the care of the state was still happening and required urgent action.

“All children and young people, including those in the care of the state, have the right to live free from all forms of violence. The state is continuing to collectively fail in upholding that right for all children and young people in care.”

Children’s Minister Karen Chhour said no amount of abuse or neglect in care was ever acceptable, “but we can’t hide from the fact that it does happen”.

She had directed Oranga Tamariki to increase its reporting and monitoring, and was pleased to see greater engagement with young people, as well as cross-agency collaboration.

“This report shows that this message is getting through, but it also highlights areas of concern. Immediate action is being undertaken by Oranga Tamariki to address its findings.”

The release of the report came a day after Chhour highlighted the implementation of a new caseload management system, saying the new technology would free up social workers to spend more time with families.

Oranga Tamariki acting chief executive Andrew Bridgman said he was deeply concerned that insufficient progress had been made in meeting the National Care Standards.

“I acknowledge there is work to be done within Oranga Tamariki, and the wider children’s system, to improve outcomes for the children and young people who most need it,” he said.

Oranga Tamariki was in the process of introducing a range of measures to ensure young people were more freely able to speak up about instances of harm, implementing the new Child Protection Investigations Unit, and mandating further staff training to ensure kaimahi were equipped to deal with situations of conflict.

The Independent Children’s Monitor’s Jones told Newsroom that while there were positive examples of social worker practice, it was not consistent across the board.

Where things were working well in communities, it was often a result of individual relationships rather than good systems that were being widely implemented.

Jones said social workers were unable to provide the care and support they wanted due to cost-cutting measures, perceived hiring freezes, a lack of resources and training, social and mental health workforce shortages, a siloed approach to care and service funding between government agencies, and prevailing societal attitudes.

Essentially, children’s agencies (including Oranga Tamariki, education, health and social development) knew what needed to be done and had the standards there to hold them accountable, but they seemed unable to join up to implement a system-wide approach to improve the lives of children in care, Jones said.

“Nothing’s changed on the ground,” he said. “The work has been done at the centre; they’ve tried to understand things, but there’s a lack of delivery and implementation.”

Jones said the recent internal restructuring of Oranga Tamariki had pulled focus away from frontline work, while scarce resources were even harder to secure following the changes to commissioning and contracting.

For instance, when children were uplifted from an unsafe environment, Oranga Tamariki social workers struggled to find approved caregivers to take in these children in emergency situations. With changes to maximum spends on contracts, even if an approved caregiver had capacity to take another child, they were not allowed to without the approval of the chief executive.

In one example, social workers had to ask a 14-year-old to text their friends to ask if they could stay the night. In some cases social workers had to stay in motel rooms with children when no other placement was available – leading to the use of motels creeping up again. But leadership was discouraging the use of motel rooms due to cost.

“We can’t get motels [because of funding restrictions] so we have to drive around at night with kids needing emergency placements. One incident where we drove around with a three-year-old, knocking on doors to find someone to take them,” one Oranga Tamariki kaimahi said.

Meanwhile, social workers were not able to visit tamariki and rangatahi as frequently as required. One third of children were not being visited as frequently as required, and 60 percent of caregivers were not being visited as planned.

The lack of visits, planning, and support for transitions into adulthood left children and caregivers unsupported and having decisions made about them without their awareness or input.

In its final report, the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care noted the state “failed to properly monitor the care of children and young people in institutions, family homes and foster homes. This included infrequent and ineffective monitoring visits by social workers and department inspectors, and unreliable paper-based monitoring”. 

The report went on to note that “social workers should have been a critical lifeline to the outside world for children and young people who were being abused in social welfare care. However, the Inquiry heard from many survivors, as well as former caregivers and social workers, that social workers visited less frequently than departmental policy required them to, and sometimes did not visit at all. State documents reviewed by the Inquiry show that social workers’ caseloads were often too high to effectively manage, which meant they visited children less regularly than required”.

There were also instances of government agencies playing hot potato with children and the funding responsibilities. This was particularly true when it came to funding school activities and additional teacher aide funding.

In some instances, boards of trustees flat-out refused to enrol children who were in state care.

According to the report, there were more than 200 tamariki and rangatahi in care not enrolled or attending school, for a variety of reasons including a lack of cross-agency collabortaion.

The longer children were disengaged from education, the harder it was to get them re-engaged.

“Tamariki and rangatahi in care are not prioritised for government services, and funding does not follow the child,” Jones said.

We consistently heard about stand-offs between government agencies over who is responsible for paying.”

The need for greater cross-agency collaboration was evident throughout the report – and an area specifically identified by the minister, Oranga Tamariki and the Children’s Commissioner as a key priority area.

But even when the onus fell entirely on Oranga Tamariki, caregivers reported having to wait too long for money for essentials like school uniforms.

“Unpaid bills for soccer by Oranga Tamariki mean that the kids have been barred from the soccer club. This impacts the kids all along. It carries on and on,” one caregiver said.

This annual report was the fourth of its kind, since the National Care Standards were adopted by Oranga Tamariki five years ago. The standards were adopted in an effort to improve the care and protection of children. As well as bolster measurement and monitoring of the care and protection system.

The regulations, which were developed by Oranga Tamariki, covered things like creating and implementing plans for kids in care and their caregivers; addressing kids’ needs for whānau connection, health and education; supporting rangatahi and tamariki to express their views and speak up when something was wrong; and supporting young people as they transitioned between and out of care. 

For the 2023/24 year, Oranga Tamariki assessed itself as meeting all of its own performance measures for just 37 percent of tamariki and rangatahi in its care. This was consistent with the findings from the Independent Children’s Monitor.

“The very slow pace of change shows that the underlying issues are not being addressed in a way that will make a difference to the lives of tamariki and rangatahi in care,” Jones said.

“The issues identified in our latest Experiences of Care in Aotearoa report are not new. If they can be addressed, we might start to see progress towards provision of the minimum standard of care. Until then, tamariki and rangatahi will continue to miss out.”

Jones said there were children who were five when they started this monitoring work. These children were nine now and had never had their needs properly met.

Jones told Newsroom he remained hopeful change would come, and was heartened by the level of engagement Oranga Tamariki had shown this time around.

“What gets measured often gets done,” he said.

And while there hadn’t been much of a shift in meeting care standards during the past four years, now there was more scrutiny and monitoring, there was greater accountability, which he hoped would help drive change.

But while Jones was hopeful things would get better, he told Newsroom he struggled to see how that would happen in the short-term. This assessment was based on what his team was currently hearing from Oranga Tamariki staff, caregivers and children across the country.

Monitoring visits for next year’s report were already underway and a visit to the Bay of Plenty at the end of last year raised many of the same issues.

The Oranga Tamariki restructure, resource cuts, and what local staff perceived to be a hiring freeze, had led to increased frontline caseloads and placed tamariki and rangatahi at further risk, according to feedback from those in the Bay of Plenty and Central Plateau. 

Oranga Tamariki kaimahi in the area who held high caseloads did not have time to conduct social worker visits or communicate with  tamariki, rangatahi and whānau – another theme that was in-line with the findings of the 2023/24 national report.

The Independent Children’s Monitor staff also heard Oranga Tamariki national office was not consulting with local sites about site budgets, resulting in insufficient funding to keep tamariki and rangatahi safe or to support whānau and caregivers.

Meanwhile, those in the Bay of Plenty also spoke about increased thresholds for reports of concern and poor communication, which created uncertainty about the safety of tamariki and rangatahi and whether support had been provided.

“We are already eight months into the next reporting period and, based on what we have heard so far from our most recent monitoring visits, we are unlikely to see improvement in our next report,” Jones said.

At the end of last year, Erica Stanford – the minister responsible for the Government’s response to the Royal Commission of Inquiry – told Newsroom while survivors of abuse in care wanted redress, there was something they wanted more.

“A lot of survivors have said to me their number one concern is that they don’t want to have what happened to them happen to anyone else,” she said.