Reunifying Children in Out-of-Home Care: Does NSW’s Permanency Support Program Affect Restorations?

The New South Wales (NSW) Permanency Support Program (PSP) introduced complex and substantial reforms to child protection and out-of-home care (OOHC) designed to improve legal permanency outcomes, including restoring children to their parents. We investigated whether children receiving OOHC services from non-governmental organisations after the PSP reform were more likely to be restored than children in a statistically-matched historical sample, focusing on: children already in care (n = 12,353; a cross-sectional cohort) and those entering care after PSP started (n = 1,063; a longitudinal cohort). Time-to-event models indicate that PSP slightly increased restoration for children already in care (HR:1.35, 95% CI:[1.1,1.64], p = 0.004) but had no discernible effect for children entering care (HR:0.84, 95% CI:[0.61,1.14], p = 0.262). That is, there was only a small amount of evidence that PSP improved restoration outcomes for children and young people. The observed differences reaffirm the necessity of analysing and considering both cross-sectional and longitudinal cohorts, especially when findings are applied to practice and research. On a broader scale, these findings highlighted the continued need for restoring more children to their parents while acknowledging challenges of implementing new policies and associated services to reduce the number of children in OOHC. IMPLICATIONS For children already in care and entering care in NSW, effective services focusing on increasing restoration and supporting permanency are needed to decrease the number of children in OOHC. Large-scale evaluations often require multiple sampling strategies and robust statistical matching procedures to obtain good evidence of effectiveness. In OOHC studies, only considering cross-sectional samples will over-represent children in long-term care and potentially obscure different outcomes for new entries to care.