Research

Research

RESEARCH

Child and Family Centre Action Research Project

This year the Foundation is continuing its commitment to promote research in relation to the wellbeing, learning an ddevelopment of Tasmanian children. In line with our strategic priority to be a strong advocate for the development of child and family centres (CFCs), the Foundation entered into a partnership in February 2009 with the Murdoch Children's Research Institute - Centre for Community Child Health (CCCH) and the Department of Education to undertake action research during the development stage of the CFCs. The CCCH is a key research centr of the Murdoch Children's Research Institute and an academic centr of theUniversity of Melbourne. The CCCH is committed to improving outcomes for children through research, advocacy, training, health education and patient services.

Martin_Obyrne Mr Martin O'Byrne is the project officer taking the lead in this research. Martin has a UTAS Bachelor of Education, specialising in early childhood education, and has worked in th ecommunity sector and the Department of Health and Human Services on the development of a collaborative strategy that strives to improve outcomes for people with multiple and complex needs through better connected and coordinated services. Martin's depth of experience in collaborative practice and early years education brings a great rigour to the Action Research Project (ARP).

What is the Action Research Project (ARP)?

The ARP is working with families and communities, services and the CFC Project Team to help answer the following questions:

What do we want to do? That is, what are the outcomes we want for children and families?
How will we do it? That is, how are we going to achieve our outcomes?
How will we know when we get there? That is, how will we know if we are making progress towards our outcomes?

The ARP is working with key stakeholders, including children and families, services and the CFC Project Team to collect, discuss and report on understanding and learning gained as communities undertake planning and discussions around the establishment and operation of child and family centres. The ARP will work with communities and services to create ongoing ways to enable reflection and mearsurement of progress towards improved outcomes for children and families.

What is Action Research?

Action research is "learning by doing". It is a hands-on method of understanding what is happening while we are doing it. Why? So that practice and processes can improve - in other words, we can change how we do things based on whether what we learn hasor hasn't worked well to date.

At the heart of action research is reflection. Through relfecting on what we are doing and why, we can adjust and modify what we do and how we work. This will help sustain good change and achieve the outcomes we want.

What has happened so far?

So far, ARP work has included:

Development of a draft Statewide Outcomes Framework - in collaboration with the CFC Project Team, this document sets out a statewide vision and broad outcomes for children, families, communities and services/supports; it also assistas with guidance and planning for local outcomes frameworks.
Connection with Social Inclusion Community Liaison Officers (SICLOs) - as pivotal connection points between communities and the CFC initiative. The SICLOs are critical to the ARP in the development of local outcomes frameworks and the subsequent collections and collation of data as we begin to track and measure local outcomes. To suport this work, an outcomes-based planning and evaluation workshop was held in June 2010 for the SICLOs to further clarify what we mean by outcomes-based planning and what tools may be helpful.
Visiting CFC communities - during April and May 2010, the first 12 CFC communities were visited to introduce the ARP and interview key people to obtain a snapshot of progress and challenges. Three broad themes emerged from this feedback:
- Community consultations - comment consistently offered regarding original community consultations when a CFC was first announced in any given community. In many instances the process appeared variable and sporadic in terms of informing a wide sparead of community regarding the announcement of a CFC in their locale, and what this meant. Subsequently early stage information dissemination and consultation also appeared variable, as some community members became aware, while others did not.
- Community/parent participation - feedback regarding community/parent participation in CFC processes identified some barriers inhibiting parent access and participation. Lack of child care during community meetings, scheduling of meetings (day and time) and the intimidating nature of some meeting formats (formal feel, language used, unfamiliar people, 'official looking/government' people) were raised as issues that ffected community/parent participation.
- Leadership - the broad notion of leadership and its influence on community engagement was raised across all CFC communities. Some responses suggested that more high-level leadership was required to promote and market the CFCs at local and statewide levels. Other responses suggested some community members/parents were intimidated and therefore became disengaged through a perception that outside people had been appointed to run the community meetings and that local community voices would not be heard. There is a strong evidence that the emerging role of Social Inclusion Officers has had a counterbalancing effect on these perceptions, with local engagement being encouraged and supported.
Development of local outcomes - in partnership with the learning and development strategy and CFC Project Team, working with local communities through their Local Enabling Group and other community forums to spark conversations about notions of change, the drean (vision), what we want to achieve for children and families (outcomes) and hearing the story of children and families in each community.

What are the next steps?

The ARP will continue to work with CFC communities over coming months to facilitate discussion around local outcomes and strategies/activities to achieve these outcomes. The ARP will work with communities to identify one outcome from each CFC community that can be mapped in detail, thereby offering an opportunity to set indicators and implement tools to collect local data in order to measure progress and effectiveness. A further area of focus will be on the extent that CFCs embrace an integrated service delivery approach, including progress and challenges.

Tasmania Together Partnership

The Tasmanian Early Years Fopundation Chair, Dr Sue Jenkins, and Mr Bob Campbell, Chair of the Tasmanian Together Progress Board, signed a partnership agreement as a shared commitment to create a consultative and collaborative relationship to work towards the achievement of Tasmania Together Goals and Benchmarks.

Tasmania Together is Tasmania's plan for the future of the State. It provides a framework for monitoring change over time and assists planning and decision-making across government, business and the community focusing on progress in identified areas of improtance to the Tasmanian community.

The Foundation's outcomes-based framework is a complimentary initiative that will assist in providing better reporting to support better decision making for our State's young children. The framework will enable both organisations to work closely to develop new benchmarks focused on children and families.

The Tasmania Together Progress Board was represented on the Foundation's Research Committee from the outset, in the establishment of the framework to improve measurement and reporting of outcomes for young children in Tasmania. This framework provides an important resource for future policy development and decision making in this crucial area.