Care should be taken when interpreting the time series for this indicator, as it has been affected by the implementation of the national definition of out-of-home care.
As of 2019, all states and territories have adopted a nationally consistent definition of out-of-home care which excludes children on third-party parental responsibility orders, children on immigration orders, young people aged 18 and over, and children in pre-adoptive placements from counts of children in out-of-home care.
Out-of-home care data for the 2018–19 reporting period are based on this nationally agreed definition and should not be compared with data for previous years or previously published out-of-home care data.
For more information on the national definition of out-of-home care, see Child protection Australia 2018–19.
Children in planned, stable out-of-home care placements tend to have better learning and psychosocial outcomes than children experiencing instability (Campo and Commerford 2016).
Children who have had only 1 or 2 placements prior to exiting out-of-home care provides a broad indicator of stability.
Children can have multiple short-term placements for appropriate reasons (for example, an initial placement followed by a longer-term placement), or it may be desirable to change placements to achieve better compatibility between a child and family. Older children are more likely to have multiple placements as they move towards independence and voluntarily seek alternate placements.
For all indicator displays, where all years of data are comparable over time an ‘All’ category will be provided as an option in the ‘Year’ drop down display. If only a selection of specific years are comparable, these years (e.g. 2017 to 2019) will be provided as an option under ‘Year’ and ‘All’ will not be an option. See the footnotes for this indicator in the supplementary tables hyperlink below for further information.