Katie* had just graduated with a criminology degree and was looking for her first full-time job when she stumbled across a glossy ad for an unlicensed youth residential care provider in Queensland.
She already had a desire to improve the lives of vulnerable children and the job ad resonated with that, while promising decent wages and six weeks of annual leave.
But on her first day of training, she was shocked that none of the recruits, herself included, had much professional experience dealing with vulnerable young people.
“There was someone from Macca’s getting trained up. People from all different walks of life,” Katie says. “That shocked me to the core. I only lasted five months.”
Katie says she spent just a week in intensive training before she was sent out to shadow another youth worker. But after that first shift, she was on her own for the overnight stays.
For the next five months, Katie was shuffled from one home to another, never staying long enough to connect with the children she was tasked to care for, who each had their own complex needs.
“It was full on for the very young ones. These kids, they needed someone solid. They just needed someone,” she says.
She witnessed everything from drug overdoses to children physically assaulting each other and punching holes in walls.
Katie and most of the other staff took up smoking because the job was so stressful.
“They put me in a house with two 16-year-old and 17-year-old guys, who were renowned for sexually assaulting women,” she says.
“Nothing ever happened, but if I knew there was a risk that I would have never gone there in the first place.”
Katie finally left the job after she was punched by a child five months after her training. It wasn’t the assault that pushed her to quit, but the reaction of her case manager who seemed more concerned about where to move her.
“They told me I was too young for the job and I felt like ‘why did you guys hire me?’” she says. “They make it sound like you’re a fun youth worker. They don’t put in the actual realities of what the work is like.
“It’s a very lonely job. You don’t have a team because it’s such a high turnover, so you meet someone new all the time. There was nothing for the young kids to do except watch TV.”
As concerns grow about the number of children entering the system, the state’s child safety minister, Craig Crawford, has ordered a review into the residential care system, which will report back later this year.
The number of children in residential care in Queensland has risen by 124% in the past five years. The state now has about 1,700 children in residential care – the highest number of any Australian jurisdiction.
A shortage of foster carers and a rise in child safety investigations have led to a ballooning number of children in residential care, according to Brian Jenkins, a lecturer in social work at Griffith university.
“The primary issue that we have in Queensland is the number of children who are coming in the front door,” Jenkins says.
While the total number of children in care is up by 8% over the past five years, the number of children in foster care has decreased by 3%.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are the most likely to be removed from home, along with children experiencing poverty, homelessness and domestic violence, statistics show.
Tamara Walsh, a human rights law professor at the University of Queensland, says better judgments need to be made about when children are removed as the act of separation from their family is “traumatic” and can harm them.
“What we find is in those situations is children do not feel loved, they do not feel cared for, they do not feel protected, and lots of them are there against their will,” Walsh says.
“In most cases, children will want to stay at home. And if they do, every effort should be made to improve their situation at home, so that’s a possibility for them,” she said.
PeakCare Queensland’s executive director, Tom Allsop, says residential care “should never be considered a default destination for young people or a safety net when the system is stretched too thin.”
He says that while residential care may be appropriate for some children with complex needs, Queensland has not invested sufficiently when it comes to in-home care models.
Coby* worked at the same unlicensed residential care provider as Katie after more than a decade in child protection interstate. Like Katie, he only lasted a few months.
He said most staff were completely unqualified and unskilled, with a blue card [a working-with-children check] and completion of a short training course being the only requirements for entry.
“Someone had been a cleaner, someone else had been driving Uber. They’ll take Joe Bloggs off the street,” he said. “Regularly someone would be sick and then I would end up in a house for four days or three days.”
Children would regularly skip school and workers could not force them to go, Cody said. He believes there needs to be a complete overhaul of the system.
“The idea of chucking kids into an agency that gets a bucket of money from the government … there needs to be more oversight, more accountability,” he said.
A department of child safety spokesperson said the Queensland government funds licensed and unlicensed residential care providers.
“The vast majority of children in residential care – 1,393 or more than 80% – are placed with our 48 licensed providers,” they said. “The remaining 328 children are placed with 68 unlicensed providers.”
The spokesperson said staff working for unlicensed providers must hold and maintain a current blue card.
“Unlicensed does not mean unregulated and we expect the same high-quality service from both unlicensed and licensed providers,” they said.
Several years on from her experience, Katie now tries to steer people away from residential care. She’s learned it’s not a job for people who “want to change the world”.
“It’s one of those workplaces where you need to have really tough skin,” she says. “It hurts your heart because you go in there wanting to help young people. And the system doesn’t allow you to.”
*Name changed to protect individuals’ privacy
