It’s one of the more exhaustive report cards issued on what a ministry does and how it goes about doing it.
The performance review on the Ministry of Children and Family Development was released recently, and it’s getting progressively more comprehensive. The hope is to identify trends in that most sensitive of ministries and track progress as well as problems. Education statistics and rates at which former clients enrol in welfare programs were discussed here Saturday.
Here’s a look at some other services delved into by the review — covering the year ending March 2014:
• Adoptions. The ministry reported 231 adoption placements, representing 16 per cent of all the children eligible for adoption. Performance improved over that year, the ministry said, because of an increase in placements and a drop in the numbers of children eligible. More children under 12 were eligible and they are three times easier to place.
There were 793 aboriginal children eligible for adoption and only 76 were placed in adoption homes. Forty-two of them (55 per cent) were placed with aboriginal families, a priority in such cases. That rate has dropped 15 percentage points in two years, reflecting more placements in non-aboriginal homes.
The wait time from being declared a permanent ward to being adopted is now 26 months. That’s two months longer than two years ago, although the variables don’t necessarily make that a trend.
• Special needs. There were 686 children with at least one recognized special need in care last year. The median cost per case has risen substantially, driven partly by the shortage of foster parents, which translates into more use of more expensive contracted services.
It’s $43,640, up nine per cent in two years. The increase is considered significant. The number of children in that category has dropped 13 per cent over the period. Broken down by age category, there are fewer older children but there was a jump in the median cost of caring for the 12-15 age category.
“This indicates that although fewer children fall in that category, those who remain are much more expensive to care for,” says the review.
There’s a remarkable range in the cost of caring for special-needs kids. Sixty per cent of them cost less than $55,000 a year to care for, but the remaining 40 per cent cost between $55,000 and $500,000 to care for, based on the acuity of their needs.
• Mental health. The ministry spends $77 million a year on mental-health services. No specific performance evaluators were included in the report, but according to a satisfaction survey conducted among clients, the overall service is well-received. Clients were asked nine questions about aspects of the service they received. Fifty-one per cent said it was excellent overall and 41 per cent said it was good or very good.
On the specific question about courtesy and respect shown by staff, the service scored a 96 per cent positive response (good, very good, or excellent). The least satisfaction is about waiting times. The numbers are comparable to a similar survey two years previously.
• Child safety. The ministry gets 37,000 protection reports a year. The preferred approach is described as a family-development response — working with families where a time-consuming and intrusive investigation is unnecessary. It serves low-risk families who need services quickly. Use of the family-development response has increased 20-fold over seven years, the ministry said.
Better prevention and other alternatives have lowered the children and youth in care caseload by 10 per cent (961 cases) over that time frame.
The number of families investigated with a protection finding decreased dramatically, while the percentage of children removed from homes after investigations increased substantially. The ministry said the child-protection workers are using investigations for more severe cases, resulting in more removals.
Overall, some of the numbers are open to interpretation. But the level of detail in the public reporting on the crucial job they’re doing is impressive.
Just So You Know: Saturday’s column said no children in care were enrolled in Math 12 until recently. In fact, the ministry said out of 493 permanent wards in 2013-14, 59 were taking some form of math.
