It refers to around 20,000 potentially serious notifications received each year by Families SA, the state’s chronically embattled child protection agency, which are filed away without any action taken.

A source familiar with the department tells InDaily the term came about “because of that sort of political sensitivity” that demanded a euphemistic alternative to the existing terminology.

“It used to be ‘RPI’ – ‘resources prevent intervention’,” the source said.

For an agency that has struggled with chronic underfunding and an inability to reform, the change is eerily symbolic; at once furtive, paranoid and desperate to suggest a protracted problem has been solved, instead of merely re-named.

If there has been a single issue that has blighted the Labor Government since Jay Weatherill’s elevation, it is child protection.

Families SA has been in the firing line like never before, culminating in a series of internal and independent reviews and a scathing judgment by the state coroner, who condemned the “systemic failings” of a department with a “poor quality of process”.

The tenure of Weatherill himself at the helm of first Families and Communities and later Education and Child Development – which subsumed Families SA – has been heavily scrutinised.

But the agency’s two most senior bureaucrats during Weatherill’s tenure insist child protection is almost universally misunderstood.

Sue Vardon was the chief executive of Families and Communities under Weatherill; Beth Dunning was her executive director. Both left the embattled department months after Jennifer Rankine took over as Minister in 2008. And both have broken their silence after being approached by InDaily, which last month revealed the extent of the agency’s underfunding, with SA ranked second lowest in Australia in 2012-13 “in terms of expenditure per child on statutory child protection services”.

They are united in arguing that sheeting blame on to morale-sapped case workers will not solve the problem.

“They get up every day and they sleep at night with the stories they hear,” Vardon says.

“They’re desperate for places for these kids, and they know there’s nowhere to take these children. Every day they face these challenges and they hear these stories and can’t do anything about it.

“They’ve been on the frontline and what do we all do (but) attack them.”

Vardon says Families SA is no different to any other service that operates a triage, wherein clients are treated according to priority.

“It’s no different in emergency departments, or police, or ambulance … of course, in any system where you put in a triage somebody falls through a crack,” she says, lamenting a prevailing community expectation to “notify, and somebody else will do something”.

“It’s almost as though the responsibility for care of the child is…not abandoned, but handed over by the person who notifies,” she reflects.

“There’s an assumption that something will happen; somebody expects a child protection worker will knock on the door and find a child abused, and instantly something will happen … but that’s not the way it works.”

There are far too many children at-risk and it’s really hard to know which ones are going to make it and which ones aren’t.

Dunning speaks with similar passion about the toll on workers and children alike, even seven years on.

“I just feel heartbroken reading all the recent media,” she says.

“Everybody is blaming the workers, and (while) the workers may not be perfect and mistakes are made, the whole agency is not corrupt, toxic and dysfunctional … (but) its morale and culture appear to be struggling.”

She says escalating service demand forces case workers to “operate in a system with few options and little choice”.

“The state just didn’t have the money to fund it properly then or now, but money alone is not the solution,” Dunning says.

“People are quick to put blame on the so-called ‘dysfunctional, toxic, social work culture’ (but) many don’t fully understand the whole system and how social workers do their best to cope and keep children safe.”

But it is the system that dictates how many can be kept safe, forcing staff to make a kind of Sophie’s Choice on any given day, and correspondingly they must raise the threshold for what constitutes a child “at-risk”.

“If you can only work with so many cases, fewer situations meet the criteria for investigation,” Dunning explains.

“There are rapidly increasing demand pressures, and no child protection system can cope with such increases. And that increases the likelihood that children at greatest risk will receive inadequate assessment and protection.”

A further day-to-day consequence, she says, is enormous pressure on staff.

“Many dedicated social workers are awake at night feeling there are cases that should have had an investigation that wouldn’t get looked at.”

The Government has long argued that under Labor Families SA’s budget has been increased from “just $90 million to over $300 million”. This month’s budget will see a further $50 million pumped in, although most of that will be soaked up by burgeoning demand for out-of-home care services.

But Dunning says while the increases are welcome, “it came from a low base and obviously it’s not funding the unmet need”.

That “unmet need” is those thousands of children who fall through the cracks, with thinly-stretched resources unable to process notifications.

So they are Administratively Closed.

Resources Prevent Intervention.

“If you’ve got 500 beds and 1000 children, then you pick out the 500 most at-risk children,” Dunning explains.

“It doesn’t mean that the 500 who miss out aren’t at risk.”

And it’s those hypothetical 500 children – in reality a far higher number each year – that do not merely miss out on statutory protection services, but whose cases are never formally assessed.

“We rarely come back and look again at the 500 kids that should have got a service, but didn’t, until a more serious complaint is made,” says Dunning. “There are far too many children at-risk and it’s really hard to know which ones are going to make it and which ones aren’t. Sadly, demand has outstripped the capacity of the agency to respond.”

‘A good Minister’

But both Vardon and Dunning, along with other insiders to whom InDaily has spoken, maintain Weatherill was a “very good Minister” who successfully laboured to prise some extra funding out of Treasury after an internal audit laid bare the magnitude of the agency’s task.

“What’s important to put on the record is that one of the people who fought hard for Families SA was Jay Weatherill,” says Vardon, recalling that Treasury was on the warpath to curb the department’s spending “and stop so many children coming into care”.

“And he said ‘I’m not going to have that; I’m not going to put up with that’, and he argued for more child protection workers,” she recalls.

“Every now and then you get a good minister who tries really hard … and then you might get another minister, and I’m not going to name any names, who tries to micro-manage, whose staff don’t know what they’re doing, who sack people, turn people over and think if you keep talking, talking, talking that a miracle will happen.”

According to Dunning, there was an improvement in morale under the now-Premier, at whose feet much of the recent public backlash has been laid.

“He took his role as the Children’s Guardian really seriously (and) he wanted to learn and reform,” she says.

“One of the things that happened under Minister Weatherill’s leadership was that risk-averseness and fear diminished quite a bit; there was energy and a shared commitment — without blame.”

The Opposition has railed against Weatherill’s insistence that the child protection agency belongs under the auspices of the sprawling Education Department. Vardon is unsure, but certain of one thing: “I know it shouldn’t be part of Health.”

Families and Communities was separated from Health when the ungainly super-department of Human Services was disbanded in the Rann Government’s first term.

“Health sucks money, and child protection shouldn’t be anywhere near it,” Vardon insists.

“However, there’s a lot of people inside Health that are really, really important in child protection … child protection is everybody’s business.

She says the notion that inspired the shift from a stand-alone department to the auspices of Education was that a school was a “circle of safety”.

“For some children, school is a safe place, so let’s build from school out … but what happens when you put child protection in the Education Department? Does education get known for wonderful radical education programs? No, no … this child protection stuff absorbs the attention of the decision-makers and distracts the attention of the decision-makers.

“Should child protection be in Education? I don’t know. There’s arguments for it, but it needs a big visionary to be able to put the pieces together.”

Mistakes are inevitable…

Weatherill tells InDaily mistakes are inevitable in a system whose fundamental principle is “asking people to make a judgement on whether a child should be supported to stay in a family or whether that child should be removed”.

“You can talk about all the reforms in the world, but ultimately it really relies on the conscientious judgement of professionals trying to make the best judgements about what’s in the interests of the child, and by definition you’re going to get that wrong,” he says.

“Because sometimes the future is not what you’re expecting it to be.

“We’re talking about the vagaries of human behaviour — you’re going to have, from time to time, dreadful things happen to a lot of children.”

He said that inevitably prompts a “natural community revulsion”, and while his own Government has joined the chorus critiquing care workers for recent failures, he warns against creating a “punitive, closed culture” in child protection.

“The risk if you demonise frontline staff is you actually create a worse child protection system than a better one,” he says.

“The most dangerous thing for any child protection system is risk averse workers making backside-covering judgements…rather than the mission of child protection agency being to stay out of trouble, we should accept that a child protection agency is always going to be in trouble, by definition.”

But does boiling down the options to a choice between removing children or not ignore the vast unmet demand, and the inability of the agency to meet it?

“Yes, if you think child protection is all about your child protection agency,” agrees Weatherill.

“But if you think it’s about every agency of Government and non-Government that comes in contact with a child, it’s a very different matter.”

What of the future?

Dunning says she now fears for the future of the embattled agency, with morale at rock bottom amid high-profile child-protection failures, public discontent and the scathing coronial inquiry.

“It’s so hard to get social workers anyway. If you’re a post-graduate social worker and want to choose a career path, it’s not going to be Families.”

And the fewer quality recruits brought in, the more the level of expertise within Families SA will diminish.

Vardon concurs: “Do you think a first-year social work student wants to work in that place? Of course not. Because they know the damage it does to those people that do.”

According to Dunning, morale and culture can only improve by fixing the whole system, but “this, of course, is very difficult to do”.

“Successive governments and administrators here and interstate have been trying for many years,” she says.

“It’s not a linear system. It reaches into many places and it starts with the really basic stuff that contributes to the wellbeing and development of a child.”

Properly understood, she says, child protection works best as an “all of Government” proposition, not the purview of a specialist entity – the approach taken in South Australia.

Families SA, she explains, is designed to administer statutory child protection, not the whole child protection system, which includes “prevention services such as health workers conducting home visits when children are born”.

Vardon muses that “it may be the problems haven’t been well articulated”.

“I get so aggrieved, because as a society we always end up at the wrong end of the bloody stick,” she says.

“You start off by thinking if you notify the Government, we’ll come in and protect (but) that’s not the answer; if you notify, the community needs to come in and protect. (Families SA) should be for the dangerous end (of the spectrum), where people shouldn’t have children to begin with.”

It takes a village …

The policy prescription, then, should reflect that adage that “it takes a village to  raise a child”, incorporating prevention and early intervention programs conducted through schools, health centres and early learning centres, and a raft of services throughout the education, health networks and associated non-government organisations.

“The statutory system is really for the most at-risk children who can’t survive with their families anymore. In these cases, placements are made with relatives, kinship carers or foster carers,” says Dunning.

“(But) there will always be about 15 per cent of kids coming into care where placement with a family wouldn’t work because the children are very disturbed and need a high level of support.”

Vardon puts it another way: “Some kids are so damaged, the most beautiful foster carers in the world couldn’t deal with them.”

In these cases, placement in care houses staffed by Families SA workers appears the only solution. But again, the number of residential care placements with stable therapeutic services are limited, and “there’s nowhere else for them to go”.

“People talk about this (Families SA) culture,” says Dunning, “of too often keeping families together (but) I don’t think that is what it is. Removal in itself carries long-term risks.”

The fundamental answer, she says, is “functional families, right at the beginning, and doing what we can to stop families damaging their children – and that (goes back) to the drug and alcohol problem”.

Coroner Mark Johns was particularly aggrieved at the suggestion of current Education and Child Development chief Tony Harrison that alcohol or drug abuse did not constitute an automatic trigger for removal of children.

But Dunning says the notion that children should be taken from parents after evidence of drug abuse is “just not viable”. Of the more than 37,000 child protection notifications the Department received each year – of which around 20,000 are “screened in”, or deemed worthy of following up – “I wouldn’t be surprised if half of them are drug or alcohol-related”.

“Where are those kids going to go?” she says.

“It is the growing frequency of drug and alcohol problems that is making it impossible to protect children at home. The large number of at-risk children is the greatest challenge, be it providing dollars or suitable alternative families.”

Vardon, the inaugural CEO of Centrelink in Canberra and a former chief of Correctional Services, Public Sector Reform and Commissioner for Public Employment, says she has known the coroner “since he was a young lawyer”, and regards the inquest as “yet another attack on the social workers”.

“The conversation,” she insists, “is in the wrong place.”

“There are heaps and heaps of children in our community who are in trouble in some way, and there’s no way the state can go rushing around taking the kids out,” she argues.

“But if one thing goes wrong…”

For Vardon, the insurmountable problem is not merely substance abuse, but its inevitable conclusion – neglect.

“Neglect is the biggest problem in child protection; it’s huge,” she says.

“Most of the stuff that comes up is neglect (and) you can’t take every child out of seriously neglected households; of course you can’t. You have to look to a range of other options.”

And that requires tackling issues such as truancy, and stockpiling genuine data on where and how often it occurs.

“Good data informs good discussion,” says Vardon, “and I suppose probably it’s an area of research that’s not being done very well (so that) people who have been in the field a long time can sit down and talk about the societal issues that are found.”

‘Neglect needs advocates’

She takes heart from the work of Rosie Batty, who has helped put domestic violence squarely in the national spotlight, crusading in the name of her 11-year-old son Luke, murdered by his father. Vardon and others did similar work highlighting child sexual abuse decades ago, but she notes that “neglect needs a few advocates”.

“What happens when people are more aware is there are more notifications … now, I’m not suggesting there shouldn’t be notifications, but there should be much better analysis of the notifications, and an approach to dissecting them: let’s try and understand these bigger social issues like neglect – why we have kids going to school every day within the Adelaide city in stinking clothes, who haven’t eaten.

“What are we doing about those conversations? We need to have some of those highlighted.”

For Dunning, the solution requires politicians from all sides “to acknowledge the unmet need, without blame”.

That requires significant steps toward appropriate funding, with investment in prevention and early intervention services to help families cope with drug and alcohol issues, mental health and unemployment, all of which put pressure on families and, ultimately, children.

“What the system has failed to do is record the unmet need (and) I think the only way the system is going to get fixed is with honesty about unmet need,” she says.

“We cannot continue to let individual caseworkers bear a share of the public opprobrium.”

In the end, though, “it’s all about community expectations”, and those expectations determine government spending priorities.

And, as Dunning wryly reflects: “Child protection is not a vote-getter … until something goes wrong.”

SA has seen a spate of recent reports about children left with unfit parents, including the notorious death of Chloe Valentine in the lax care of her mother Ashlee Polkinghorne.

But for Families SA, Vardon explains, “that’s our daily bread”.

“Everyone’s saying, ‘Oh my goodness, isn’t this terrible’, but Families SA workers see it many times a day, and you can’t go around taking every child from every family if the parents are stupid or silly.”

She says she has fronted the ongoing Nyland Royal Commission into Families SA. Her message was: “You’ve got to do something about the abusers.”

“The solution for everything (seems to be) to make the rules harder for social workers, to make the hoops harder for them to jump through, but that’s not the answer to anything,” she says.

“I refuse to engage in a conversation that says the answer lies in more rules for social workers.

“I used to think we were the good guys.”