Clearer picture of Ontario’s child protection system needed, author of report says
Nico Trocme, co-author of a report expected to be released Thursday, describes a child protection system so complex and decentralized that no one has any idea how it’s performing on a province-wide basis.
Thestar.com
May 19, 2016
By Sandra Contenta
The Ontario government has no way of knowing whether vulnerable children are receiving quality care in foster homes and group homes, says an expert appointed to review the province’s “very fragmented” child protection system.
Nico Trocme, co-author of a report expected to be released Thursday, describes a child protection system so complex and decentralized that no one has any idea how it’s performing on a province-wide basis.
“As we spoke to different people, I kept thinking of the blind man describing different parts of the elephant,” says Trocme, referring to the province-wide consultations he conducted with two other members of the government-appointed panel.
In a phone interview from his office at McGill University in Montreal, Trocme wouldn’t discuss specific recommendations in his report. But he made clear that amalgamating Ontario’s 47 privately run children’s aid societies into a single publicly run service would not be one of them.
“We saw a lot of strengths and a lot of good reasons to continue building on the model that’s in place,” he says, noting the strong connection societies have to their communities, and the range of services provided. “I certainly wouldn’t be calling to blow up the system.”
But with 600 agencies providing services of different sorts - from group homes to mental health facilities - the need for a clear picture of how the system functions province-wide is all the more crucial, Trocme adds.
Yet the Ministry of Children and Youth Services can’t even say how many times kids in care are bounced from one foster or group home to another.
“That information is not available at a provincial level, which begs the question: where is the oversight?” says Trocmé, director of McGill’s school of social work.
Trocme says he was also struck by the lack of standards for people working with children in residential care, particularly group homes. Qualifications required - from education levels to the amount of pre-service training received - varied from one home to another.
“Given how important those relationships are to children doing well, the lack of clear standards around human resources was surprising,” he says.
Young people heard by the expert panel described a foster and group home system focused on compliance to rules and routines. “It’s a behaviour management system as opposed to a caring, supporting, loving system,” Trocme says.
The ministry struck the expert panel after an ongoing investigation by the Star found a child protection system that is often unaccountable and secretive. At stake are the lives of 15,625 children who, on average, were in foster or group home care in 2014-15, and the well-being of thousands more investigated for possible abuse.
Children’s aid societies received about $1.5 billion in government funding last year.
Trocme says a centralized database the ministry is implementing, known as CPIN, will improve access to the kind of province-wide data needed. But he criticized the ministry for failing to analyze and make public the data it already collects from children’s aid societies, and applauded the Star’s attempts to do so.
A Star analysis of Toronto reports on serious occurrences in group homes and foster homes found a high numbers of kids being physically restrained by caregivers, and police often called to deal with kids acting out.
“I can’t think of too many things more important than our ability to be confident that the most vulnerable young people in Ontario are receiving high quality residential services,” Trocme says.
“But at the moment, it’s really not possible to say, ‘Here’s where we are in Ontario with regards to quality of care.’ ”
