Ms Kate Duggan:

Mr. Hone will take aftercare in a moment. On the guardian ad litem, that is the voice of the child in court. We are absolutely grateful for the organisation, which I am sure the Senator knows of, called Empowering People in Care, EPIC. It is an advocacy service for children and young people in aftercare. That extends to young people in aftercare. We fund that service and absolutely encourage and direct young people in aftercare to use that service as their advocacy service. In the interim and through the regulation of the guardian ad litem service, the scope and remit of its work would be looked at through the Department under the scoping of that service.

On the structure bits, as an organisation we know from international research that when you create silos or separate structures within an agency, the risk is that children and young people start to fall between those. Something can be right up to the age of five, and then if they have to try to move to a different service, there can be a blockage and so on. We have looked at the whole restructuring and what we have come up with now as the new way of working is around the fact that within our community services, it will be one single point of contact, making sure we look at the total need of a child, and then we have the right response pathway. We will have an early intervention response pathway, a family support response pathway and a child protection response pathway. While the response pathways will be different, they will be managed by one person to make sure that the risk of any child falling between or being in the right or wrong pathway does not happen. Within our alternative care services, we have foster care services, residential care services, aftercare services, separated children services and special emergency arrangements. They are now all coming in under the governance of one function to make sure we are getting better efficiencies and productivity. We are able to see whether, on any one night, all of our beds and placements across the systems are being used. We have put much work and research into the evidence base for the new structures. With the best of the information we have available to us, we believe now it is the right structure to try to deal with the real fundamental challenges we are trying to deal with at the moment.

Mr. Hone will come in on aftercare.