Safety-net plan for children praised by ministers

A proposal for a child "safety-net" from Children's Commissioner Cindy Kiro has been welcomed by ministers.

They met Ms Kiro yesterday to discuss her plan, and Social Development Minister David Benson-Pope said he and his colleagues were keen to follow up on its suggestions.

He said Ms Kiro's plan was for an integrated framework to track children's health, safety and education from birth to adulthood.

It involved welfare, health and education agencies working together to "cement the cracks" so that no child needing help was left without support.

"A lot of it we're doing now. She describes it as a 10-year vision to make sure that every single child has what they need, and that sits pretty comfortably with the policy of the party that I'm part of," Mr Benson-Pope said.

With him at the meeting with Ms Kiro were Health Minister Pete Hodgson, former health minister and now Minister of Police Annette King and Maori Affairs Minister Parekura Horomia.

Dr Kiro said today her plan was to have four comprehensive assessments looking at the health, education, safety and welfare of "every single child" at key developmental milestones in their lives.

Checks would be done during the first two years of a child's life, when children went to school, during their adolescent years, and in the "youth transition period" when teenagers left high school to take up jobs or enter further education.

"What we're doing is putting in place a comprehensive assessment process which picks up children at key developmental points and makes sure that in fact their needs are going to be met."

Checks might reveal some children needed more help than others.

Some might need, for instance, a hearing aid, or something done for their sight or vision, or they might have a particular learning disorder.

There would then be a "co-ordinated response" to help such children.

"My proposal is that we build on things that I think are working really well."

As an example of the type of assessments that would be used, Dr Kiro cited the Aim High programme, running in some south Auckland and Porirua schools, that had comprehensive assessments covering the emotional, physical, cognitive and social domains of a child's life.

The Well Child programme providers were an obvious choice for carrying out assessments in children's early years, Dr Kiro said. These providers included Plunket as well as some iwi and Pacific groups.

The aim was to stop children falling through the gaps.

"The ones who will benefit the most are those who are most at risk."

Dr Kiro said her investigation into the murders of Masterton sisters Saliel Aplin and Olympia Jetson had shown mental health services, special education, and care and protection services were all involved in their case, but these efforts were not well co-ordinated.

"What this system will do is send an alert so that somebody knows who the agencies are that have actually been involved."

In the case of Saliel and Olympia, if the police had known that Child, Youth and Family, special education and mental health services had been involved, they might have responded differently to the domestic violence incidents, Dr Kiro said.

"If, for example, education had known that the police had been called 36 times to that home, they might have responded differently."

Saliel and Olympia were killed by their stepfather, Bruce Howse, in their sleepout. A court was told he had sexually abused both and murdered them by stabbing them once each. Howse was sentenced to life imprisonment with a 28-year non-parole period.

Dr Kiro said government ministers had been positive and her ideas tracked across other work the Government was doing.

- NZPA