Ministry of Justice, New Zealand

Family Safety Teams (FST)

A Joint initiative between Police, Ministry of Justice, Child, Youth & Family and the community sector

REPORT FROM THE FAMILY SAFETY TEAM NATIONAL STEERING COMMITTEE TO THE EVALUATION ADVISORY GROUP

At their latest meeting on Monday the 4th of September 2006, the Family Safety Team National Steering Committee received copies of the revised draft Evaluation Report on the Family Safety Team pilot project, prepared by the Evaluation Team from Auckland University.

At a prior meeting in October, the National Steering Committee were made aware that this revised report would be made available to them for their consideration and comment and that the Evaluation Advisory Group had requested that they (the NSC) prepare an action plan to address the issues raised in the report.

The purpose of this report is to outline the areas of work which the NSC has already supported and undertaken to address some of these issues and to identify project plans which are intended to progress the project over the next twelve months.

ENVIRONMENT

1. The draft Evaluation Report identifies the fact that the Family Safety Teams, (FSTs) have been located in areas where there is already recorded high volume family violence. There may have been a presumed expectation that this would increase the likelihood of the teams making an impact. It may also have been with the intention of meeting stakeholder expectations in these areas. While both reasons are understandable, it is evident that by reducing the size of the teams, placing them in areas of high volume and, in some cases with no collaborative case management models operating, these decisions have reduced the likelihood of any measurable impact and have not met stakeholder expectations.

ACTION TAKEN

• The NSC has supported the Auckland team to focus on the more manageable area boundary of Grey Lynn/ Onehunga.

• The NSC has also supported the Hutt team to focus, in the short term, on the Lower Hutt area which did not have a case management group.

• The FST National Coordinator has maintained communication with the Auckland and Wellington Police District Commanders to address the issue of the need for Police Family Violence Coordinators in Auckland city and the Hutt Valley to coordinate collaborative case management of family violence cases resulting from Police Pol 400 reports.

• The NSC has supported the Auckland team to establish and maintain communication and collaborative efforts with a wider range of family violence service organisations in the Auckland area, with the ultimate aim of establishing area based collaborative case management groups to identify and manage risk and need in family violence.

• The NSC representatives for Child, Youth and Family and for Adult Advocacy have supported the FST in Hutt Valley to establish a case management group for Lower Hutt which has now been operating for over a month and involves the key family violence service agencies in this area. Communication with Child, Youth and Family, in particular, has been successful in ensuring their support for and involvement in this process.

• While the FST contract with Hutt City Women's Refuge has been terminated and a new advocate provider agency contracted, NSC representation has supported and achieved improved and continued communication with Hutt City Women's Refuge which has ensured their continued involvement with the work of the FST.

• The FST National Coordinator has worked with the Wellington District Commander to improve the communication of FST objectives and needs to the Area Commanders in the Hutt Valley. The Lower Hutt Area Commander has recently taken over leadership and support for the FST in Lower Hutt.

• The NSC has supported the re-location of the Hutt FST to a neutral site alongside the Lower Hutt Police Station. This has resolved the t&T problems which had been encountered and has also improved the team's access to Police family violence information. This move has also resulted in the team being co-located with a full time family violence coordinator who will be coordinating the collaborative case management meetings. One negative impact of this has been the fact that the new Police Family Violence Coordinator is actually a FST Police investigator who has now left the team. This team have no Police investigators currently working as part of the FST.

The NSC recognises that the establishment of such a case management model will take time, trust and tenacity, the most significant of which is the time required to build the relationships to achieve this, and to put in place the formal processes to maintain it.

NEED FOR GREATER CLARITY

2. The Evaluation Report identifies that a lack of clarity in job descriptions and employment contracts has impacted on all teams. This perhaps reflects the speed with which the project was required to be implemented to meet budgetary constraints and requirements. It also reflects the need for flexibility to have been built into the design of the project to ensure that local needs and issues were able to be reflected, identified and incorporated into any formative evaluation. This is an evolving process.

ACTION TAKEN

• A contract review has been undertaken, in consultation with the contracted partners, which addresses the issues of:

• The National FST Coordinator has met with all the FST partners to discuss and gain agreement on the issue of the need for FST staff to only be engaged in FST work.

RECRUITMENT AND STAFF TURNOVER

3. The Report identifies recruitment and staff turn-over as issues, particularly affecting the Auckland team.

The NSC note that this issue is likely to be a feature of any new pilot project where there are twelve monthly contract reviews. While the project undertakes for Police to contract with NGO organisations to recruit and employ advocate staff, the responsibilities and details related to the individual employment contracts and conditions remain between those agencies and the staff they employ and are not the responsibility of the NSC.

Further, the nature of the work is such that some staff will be likely to review their positions on the team as they assess their suitability and job satisfaction on an ongoing basis. Some staff clearly have left due to changes in personal circumstances. While this can be unsettling to pilot teams, it is not entirely unexpected.

ACTION TAKEN

• The Auckland team has been without a CYF representative since January of this year. With the support of the NSC representative of Child, Youth and Family a CYF representative has now been employed and started work with the team on September 11th.

• Another Auckland advocate staff member left the team to have another child. She has also recently been replaced.

• The Child Advocate position on the Auckland team has, as yet, not been filled since the resignation, in July, of the last advocate. The contracting agency has sought the support and assistance of the FST Coordinator to manage this and they will be working on a plan together to improve recruitment options.

• The 12 month contract of the Wairarapa CYF representative ended in June and her replacement has been appointed and starts work with the team on the 17th of October.

• As stated, the Hutt team are currently without Police investigators and these positions are currently being advertised, with the options of flexible secondments being offered to attract staff. The downside of this is the lack of consistency and stability for the teams,

COMMUNICATION OF ROLES

4. The report also highlights areas where there exists a lack of clarity and understanding of the role and function of the teams eg: where the teams are seen as performing roles and becoming engaged in work outside the FST framework and under pressure from their own agencies. An example of this relates to the teams becoming involved in training delivery for Police staff and monitoring of Police family violence files, where this is in fact the role of the Police Family Violence Coordinator.

While the NSC has also noted this trend, it needs to be seen in the context of the pilot nature of this project and the fact that while unintended, this is also a natural consequence of a new and untried way of working, involving a variety of organisationally different agencies. With regard to this particular example, the Police representative on the NSC sees that joint training delivery is a useful way of disseminating good practice, while demonstrating multi-agency partnership. The fact also remains that the project is generally seen as "Police led" and, where there is no Police Family Violence Coordinator operating, there is a tendency to see the FST as fulfilling a much needed function.

Further to this, the Police team members have identified that remaining visible and active in a mentoring role within the Police organisation gives the project and the team members credibility in a reactive and constrained operational environment.

It is clear that communication of the FST objectives, framework and contractual obligations is key to addressing almost all of the issues raised in the Evaluation Report. To this end the NSC has implemented the following:

ACTION TAKEN

• The role of the National Family Safety Team Coordinator has been reestablished as a Secretariat to introduce greater clarity and independence and to better meet the management and governance needs of the project

• A nationally consistent reporting template has been created for the teams themselves to maintain clarity around the framework for their role and the evaluation criteria. (Copy attached) These reports are updated monthly and now enable the NSC to monitor the work of the teams and identify which local issues can be progressed at a national level. These reports also assist the teams to remain focussed on their project objectives and enable them to feel supported by their national counterparts. This continues to be work in progress and will evolve as the project develops.

• The contract review, as stated earlier in this report, also establishes a means by which the advocate provider agencies, as well as Police management, can communicate local FST issues to the National Steering Committee by way of quarterly reports. The first reports are due at the end of September.

• The NSC, supported by the FST Secretariat, has worked at more clearly defining the roles and responsibilities of the District Management groups and the National Steering Committee by creating new Terms of Reference for the Secretariat and the National Steering Committee.

• A Roles and Responsibilities Report has also been prepared, alongside the Terms of Reference, to be communicated to the local management groups, This report identifies the need for the previously referred to, but not clearly defined District Implementation Teams, to now be called District Management Teams. This report outlines the contractual obligations of each party and also demonstrates how these teams fit within the national project structure and defines the management vs the governance roles. This also remains a work in progress and will evolve as the project develops.

• A new Communications strategy is currently being developed to improve communications to the FST sites, the local communities and to wider stakeholder groups. The FST newsletter will be reinstituted to complement this process,

ONGOING SUPPORT AND TRAINING

5. The Evaluation Report highlights the need for the teams to be adequately supported and for professional development needs to be identified and, where possible, met.

ACTION TAKEN

• The FST Secretariat is currently putting together a proposal for group supervision for all FSTs to guide and support practice development.

• It is proposed that this work be established from a nationally consistent framework to ensure consistency and to disseminate good practice as it develops.

• This is in the early stages of development, will need to be costed as a separate project expense and has not been signed off by the NSC as yet. This will evolve as the project develops.

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS

6, The report highlights the need for each team to have the facility or systems to collect, record, analyse and report the essential Family Violence data which measures the impact of their work.

While the NSC completely agrees with this project requirement, it is also evident that, in recruiting and employing "hands on" practitioners, there is a need for a major mindset shift to be undergone by team members to understand and fulfil their roles in evaluating, monitoring and assessing the systems, practices and interventions operating in their sites.

It is important that the FST members have practice based experience in order for them to understand the various systems and practices they are looking at. The role of an analyst is specialised and the NSC would see that this role needs to operate independently but alongside that of the advocates and investigators.

Further, the issue of access to accurate and reliable data in the area of Family Violence is one which needs to be addressed nationally by a range of relevant agencies and is not likely to be realistically achieved within this project framework.

INFORMATION SHARING

7, This issue remains at the core of FST work, and family violence work nationally.

While the NSC recognise the need for formal processes to be put in place to ensure safe and adequate information sharing to assess risk and need in family violence cases, it also needs to be recognised that even in those areas where collaborative case management groups are operating, this work is informal and based on trust relationships built up over long periods of time.

The FSTs, in attempting to establish such groups in their sites, are fulfilling their role of improving collaboration and communication. In order to maintain the relationships to continue this work there needs to be national consistency, knowledge and education around the issue of information sharing in general.