The Centre of Excellence has been a vision of the Board and leadership of QATSICPP for a number of years. As a group we were successful in getting the Centre of Excellence included in the Changing Tracks Action Plan. So, with support from the Department of Child Safety, Youth and Women we have begun to establish our Centre of Excellence.
The main aim of the Centre is to:
Build a critical evidence base informed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge and experience to influence policies and practices to combat the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in the child protection system.
We aim to:
- Coordinate, produce and commission evaluation and research in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander child and family well being
- Produce and promote evidence translation materials
- Explore and Promote Innovative Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Practices in the child protection sector
Inform Policy and Practice
In short, The Centre of Excellence will:
- Drive Solutions, not describe problems
- Elevate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Knowledge and wisdom
- Document what works and how to ensure scaling up of best practice
- Support Implementation of the Aboriginal Placement Principle
- Support policy maker to make evidence based decisions and investments
With these great aims we started work on creating the foundations for the Centre in February this year. To date we have:
- Developed a project plan to guide our implementation
- Commissioned a scoping paper to assist in developing our foundational evidence base
- Developed a Promising Practice Case work framework to document our success
- Started to collect case studies from our member organisations and promising practice in the child protection sector
- Built a platform on our new website for the Centre of Excellence where we can feature case studies and our work.
- Started to build relationships with Universities and researchers who will partner with us in our work
Our next steps:
We are about to embark on developing an evaluation framework for QATSICPP similar to the Practice Standards and we are looking forward to member involvement in assisting us in the important project.
We are purchasing software to assist us to build a qualitative data base that will support us in building our evidence base.
We will be working on examining quantitative data fields to understand how we can track our efforts to create change to the disproportionate numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in the child protection system.
How can you engage?
Do you have some research and evaluation you are participating in. Please let us know it will be great to hear of your work and be able to feature it on our website.
We urge members to contact us to document your case study, this is done via a qualitative interview and is written up by us and returned to you for refinement and approval. The case studies will also feature on our website and be available for you to use for reports. The more we have the stronger our evidence creation.
Watch for our updates in Communiques and don’t hesitate to contact us to discuss your thoughts and aspirations.
As the Kev Carmody song says “From Little Things big things Grow” – we are starting small but QATSICPP aspires for our Centre of Excellence to be a world class institution and we have begun to deliver on this aspiration.
If you have any questions, or would like more information please contact Lisa Hillan at QATSICPP.
