 All right. We might kick off and then we can add extra people as they join in. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Christabel Darcy. I'm the co-convener of the Northern Territory AES along with Cat Street. I'd like to start by acknowledging the Larakia people as the traditional owners of the Darwin area where we are and pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging. I'd also like to acknowledge that our gathering today includes a range of lands across Australia. Our presenters today are Mark Galvin and Melissa Kultner from EY. The presentation was originally planned to be an in-person event in Darwin earlier in the year but was postponed due to COVID-19. So a big thank you to Mark and Melissa for being flexible and agreeing to do the presentation via Zoom today instead. Mark is a partner at EY's government and public sector practice and leads the firm's evaluation practice network. He's an economist and an evaluator with nearly 20 years' experience in a professional advisory consultant. Dr. Melissa Kultner is an associate director in EY where she leads their human services evaluation projects. The presentation today is about driving sustained change in child protection through action learning and it's a case study of open adoption from care. Mark will speak about the experience of the adoption's task force from care and Melissa will add some extra context around child protection and out-of-home care and some of her previous research. In terms of housekeeping we will be recording this and please feel free to type any questions that you have in the chat box and we will get to them at the end if we can. In terms of timing, Mark has another meeting after this one so we're going to aim to wrap up things at around the 50 minute mark. All right with that being said I'm going to hand over Mark and thank you very much for joining us today. Good afternoon everyone and thanks for that introduction, Christabel and thank you all for choosing to spend an hour of your Wednesday with us wherever you are. I think it's still the morning in Perth but most of us are in an hour and hour afternoon, Wednesday afternoon. Firstly, I'd also like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land who for me are the Camarago people of the Eora Nation which is in the sort of North Sydney, northern suburbs areas of Sydney and I'd like to pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging not only to the Camarago people but for the traditional custodians of the lands from wherever you happen to be joining us today. And just an important acknowledgement before we start and I'd like to acknowledge this from the outset that the subject matter within this presentation may be somewhat uncomfortable or even distressing for some people on this call. And the reason for that is that the subject matter I suppose although we're talking about action learning it is within the context of open adoption and we know that generally adoption has ended itself a very poor reputation in Australia due to past harmful practices which have impacted and continue to impact on many families in Australia. Thankfully practice has changed significantly in recent decades and open adoption has practiced throughout Australia and the practice of open adoption recognises that for some children who can't live safely with their birth families adoption can support their well-being, stability, family and cultural connections. Current open adoption practice recognises that there is benefit for children when both birth and adoptive families remain connected and a part of the child's life in a meaningful way. In New South Wales which is where this case study is set legislation contains what is known as a permanency hierarchy and that recognises that children are better served when they can be returned safely to their birth families and where this can't be achieved there are other alternatives that may be considered including a third party guardianship alternative or adoption. And like other Australian states, New South Wales follows the Aboriginal child placement principles and in legislation in New South Wales adoption is considered the least desirable option for Aboriginal children and it's normally only an option under exceptional circumstances. And to that point I'd like to, or Christy Bell has already introduced my colleague Dr. Melissa Colton and I might just add my thanks for agreeing to participate in the cameo appearance today. But Melissa's background is as an academic researcher and she was employed by the department during the time of the adoptions transformation program and she led some important research that was a precursor to the adoptions transformation program that I'll ask her to give you an overview of. So welcome Melissa, thanks for joining. Thanks Mark. Now we don't have a great deal of time but what we hope to do with you today is talk a little bit about the context. As I said that research that was a precursor to the transformation program, I'll talk a little bit about the adoption program itself. You'll actually learn a little bit about adoption as part of this as well as the methodology that underpins the transformation program. And all going to plan we should have a few minutes towards the end for some questions. So with that I'll hand over to you Mel. Thanks Mark. So I'll give you just a little bit of background. But as Mark mentioned I'm a researcher by background out of home care as my area of specialty and at the time that this work was undertaken that Mark will be talking about today I was leading a research team within family and community services. I was there doing a range of research looking at trying to understand the drivers of adoption practice that I'll talk about. But before I move into that I thought it'd be useful just to give you a little bit of background on the evidence behind adoption and the reason why adoption is considered open adoption is considered for some children in care. So we know that when children come into care we're obviously looking to create stability. Yet data from New South Wales and this is similar across the board in Australia indicates that a large portion of children in care actually experience multiple placements. So at the time when this study was undertaken almost 40% of children who were in care had experienced three or more placements and you can imagine that even where those placements are planned placement changes there's still an impact on attachment for those children as they move between placement to placement. There's been a range of studies which have indicated that there are positive outcomes for children in adoption relative to foster care. Some of that's about less placement breakdown and about having more stability for children in care. There's been some studies that have suggested that there are better developmental outcomes for children as well. So wellbeing outcomes, education outcomes too, stronger sense of self reported security and belonging in children who are adopted relative to those who remain in foster care. And some Australian studies which have highlighted positive outcomes for children, including a Bernardo study that you may have seen. So Bernardo's actually went back and retrospectively looked through 30 years worth of their adoptions of children from care, contacted those families and those children and studied their trajectories. And what they found was that children had high rates of sense of stability and belonging to their families. They had stayed connected with their adoptive families and with their birth families going forward. So there's some really interesting work there around the continuation of relationships between birth families and adoptive families and those children as they're adopted from care. I'll get you to move to the next slide. At the time that I was leading research work in this space, we were looking to understand what was actually driving practice. So although there was legislation in place to enable adoption from care, there was fairly minimal numbers of children who are actually being considered for adoption. And we were wanting to understand what was driving that. There were some perceptions that there was a due to the history of poor practice and adoption, which Mark mentioned, that there was a bit of a bias, if you will, from the front line and that the front line won't actually ideologically on board with the idea of adoption. And so the suggestion was that the front line child protection practitioners weren't actually considering adoption. And then that was a big barrier for practice. So we wanted to understand what was actually underpinning practice. And in talking with stakeholders, we realised that actually there was very little evidence base upon which that idea was based, that practitioners did have that bias. And so we went out and surveyed a range of practitioners across both facts, practitioners and NGOs. So in New South Wales, our practice is divided so that we have about 50% of our children in out of home care sit within the NGO sector and 50% within facts at this time. So we did surveys with a large number of practitioners and then we also did interviews with a smaller number of practitioners to understand what was really driving practice. And what we found was that in the main, most practitioners, the vast majority of practitioners actually felt that open adoption could serve the needs of some children in care, but the barriers for them were more around capability, not understanding how to actually go through the process, capacity, obviously out of home care generally, caseworkers tend to be fairly stretched for time and the idea of having to integrate the additional service burden that was necessary to consider adoption for a child in care was also a barrier. Communication, so a large number of our caseworkers indicated that actually they didn't feel confident to even have a conversation about open adoption with birth families. So they didn't know how to make those steps and culture was only a small component of what was driving practice or lack thereof in that space. One of the other things that came up throughout our study was the process issues. And to that end, we then spoke to EY and engaged Mark and his team to come and have a look and understand what was actually driving some of the long processes. So at the time, and I think probably Mark about to step on some of the content that you've got, but at the time there was about a four and a half year period from a person, a carer, actually expressing interest in wanting to adopt a child to that order being granted. And there were a range of issues in process that were occurring. So we then contracted EY and I'll head over to Mark to talk a little bit about some of the work that Mark then did in that space. Okay, thanks Mel. So this just give you a bit of a quick snapshot of the situation as it was in 2017. I think it was about June 2017 as the adoption transformation program got underway. So the number of children in care, which I think is more or less the same as it is now, was around 20,000 children that's in some form of care, whether it be foster care, residential care or another type of care. Most of these kids or have a long term care order. So that means that they will essentially be in foster care until the age of 18. And they will spend on average about 13 years in care. As far as adoptions were concerned, there were over 500 matters in an adoption process or children in an adoption process. So now these are all, when we talk about adoption in this context, we're talking about foster carers electing to adopt the child that they're already caring for. So this usually happens within sort of one to two years if a foster carer is interested in adoption, they can enter the process at that point. And I think Mel, you mentioned they were taking about four and a half years. The figure we had at that time was 5.2 years. Some were taking seven years. There was even one that was taking 10 years. So if you think about the amount of time out of a childhood that when you're in this uncertain process, that was just unacceptable to everyone. New South Wales was doing the most adoptions from foster care at the time and is still doing the most foster care adoptions in Australia by a long way. At that time in 2015, 16, there had been 67 adoption orders made in New South Wales. So when we came in, we were faced with a whole set of circumstances in that the adoptions process was a persistent problem in terms of the length of time it was taking and the sort of confused process that had been built up over many, many years. There were cultural issues at play potentially that Mel alluded to in her research. And adoptions was a low priority. And the reason I say that is that the model that was used and is still used within the department to some extent is that there's a significant reliance on caseworkers to progress an adoption matter. So although there are regional adoption coordinators, it's caseworkers that are performing the casework and preparing the or pulling together the evidence that the court requires for an adoption order. Now you can imagine with high case loads that caseworkers have a number of competing priorities and they are quite rightly focused on the more pointy end of child protection rather than processing and adoption for a child who's in a safe and stable environment. And so that was part of the reason why there was such a long timeframe involved. So this isn't a presentation on how adoptions are done in New South Wales, but it's important to have some context as I sort of talk more about the way in which we approached it. So it's essentially a five-stage process, although there is some blurring between the different phases. So as I said, if a foster care is interested in adopting the child in their care, they will make an inquiry and they will be asked to attend a seminar. The seminar will talk to them about what's involved in the adoption process and some of them sort of more future elements of adopting a child. If the carer is still interested following the seminar, you move into an assessment stage and that assessment is typically done by an external party. It doesn't have to be, but they're essentially mostly contracted out to independent assessors. And that assessment will assess the carer's suitability to become an adoptive parent. Now they've already been assessed and vetted as a foster carer, but there are other elements as you'd appreciate involved in actually adopting a child. The approval and finalization stage is where it's where most of the documents are prepared for court, so the affidavits and other court requirements, birth certificates, marriage certificates, medical records and so forth. Within that phase, there's often a lot of work going on in terms of locating birth parents, which is actually something that occurs in a large number of these cases. Generally, it's about tracking down a father or a mother who has, for whatever reason, not on the radar anymore. And so that can also take a significant amount of time. Then the application is made to the New South Wales Supreme Court, which is quite unique in Australia. I think it's the only jurisdiction in Australia where the Supreme Court is actually the determining court. The application is made, the birth parents are served and given a period to respond. They may or may not at that point contest the adoption. And whether it's contested or not, there is a court process associated with then making the order. So the elapsed time in each of those stages of the process are given there below. So you can see it's that approval and finalization stage where all of that casework and legal work is being done. That was driving a lot of that time. But also, as I said, foster carers are already assessed and vetted as foster carers. So one and a half years almost for assessing them for their suitability to be adopted parents was also an area that raised a few questions in this process. We're gonna talk about action learning as what underpins the adoption transformation program. But it's a bit of a confession I suppose is that we did not approach this with a particular methodology in mind. In fact, we almost retrofitted what we had done to a methodology that already existed. We approached it like it was a problem. And like you approach any problem, you try to understand what's going on, you try to identify areas which can be improved and you set up a model whereby you can learn continuously and reflect and introduce changes rapidly. It was important at this point that we had the sponsorship and the authority I suppose to do things differently as well. And we undertook a rapid discovery phase where we identified several, I guess key issues is that the process was at risk of moving away from having children at its core. There was a little bit of what I might call form over substance in terms of a strong focus on the evidentiary requirements and ticking all the boxes and making sure that all of that was already for court which is really important but perhaps less of an emphasis on communication, on engagement of the various stakeholders involved and transparency I suppose in the process. We noted that prospective adoptive parents were required to comply with a whole lot of legal requirements and other requirements but they were not necessarily engaged and involved in the decisions. And we felt that as the foster carers who were looking to become adoptive parents were ultimately the people who would be providing permanency for the child that there was scope there to bring them closer to the process. We found that data was limited and it wasn't in real time. So we had to wait a certain period of time until we got age, what they call age data to allow time for case workers to enter information and so forth. Now that's really important when you need absolute accuracy and you're using it for reporting particularly to external parties. But what we were after was sufficient information to guide our decision making. And we didn't mind if it wasn't quite as accurate as it needed to be but it was just sufficient to help us understand if we're on the right track. And so we undertook a quite a significant negotiation internally for the use of real time data or close to real time that was sort of embargoed so we weren't using it for any reporting purposes. And we looked at the performance measures that were in place and the performance measures used were the number of orders that were being made but as you saw in the previous diagram, a lot of that, once you put the application in court, a lot of that is down to the court. The department, the NGOs involved in this process have no influence whatsoever on the timing for that matter once it actually enters the court. And so we changed the performance measure to something that was actually able to be influenced which was getting the paperwork together and making the application. So applications to court became our new performance measure. We also found that the process is quite disjointed. So we have in New South Wales, we have the department processing a large number of matters itself. We have one or two accredited agencies, one of them is Binados, which is fully accredited to run end-to-end adoption processes without involvement from the department and make the applications to court in its own right. And we have another of other NGOs with varying experience of adoption that are relying on support from the department in processing those adoptions. So, and we have birth parents and we have the Crown Solicitors Office, the Supreme Court, we have a number of stakeholders involved and it was very much quite a siloed process and sort of hand-off points at each stage. So we sought to understand how we could bring bring more of a multi-disciplinary focus and an end-to-end visibility across the process. And the other thing was that we had a significant pressure, I suppose, coming political pressure on ensuring that we maintained the required level of quality in the process that satisfied the court's evidentiary requirements. But there was an expectation that by changing this process and minimizing the time, there would be a lot more adoption orders in the process. So it was on us to ensure that we had some quick and early wins, if you like, to demonstrate the efficacy of what we were trying to do. But we also didn't want to slow down the process and as I said, the process had evolved over a number of years, policies and requirements and forms that had never really been reviewed and really stripped back to the legislation and built out again. And we found that had we decided to work closely with the existing team, there was a real, really, real risk that we would actually slow down the adoptions as a result of changing things. And we wanted to ensure that the adoption process was not disrupted in this way. One of our underpinning principles was that no child would be worse off in terms of the time it would take in this process by our intervention. And we surrounded ourselves with the right legal and casework advice as we went. So what we decided in consultation with the department to do is to set up a parallel, but quite autonomous and independent process using real-time data to inform what we were doing, to break down the silos by establishing a multi-disciplinary team. So we had caseworkers, we had legal people, we had policy people and a number of paralegals and so forth. We tried to understand how we could triage this 500-odd cases in the backlog of adoption matters. And we looked for the things that were taking time. So as I said, one of them was finding birth parents where they were unable to be found. One of them was whether the child had siblings that needed to be considered as part of the contact arrangements in the adoption process. And a whole range of other things that had a relationship with how long it was taking. And initially we did some triage to identify those cases that we thought we could move relatively quickly. So where the birth parents had consented and some of those other factors weren't at play. And that way we thought we would optimise the process for the whole group by doing that triage process. We established an incubator model with some of the NGOs. As I said, some of them were really experienced at undertaking adoptions and others were really embarking on this for the first time. And so we established a process whereby we worked hand in hand with some of those agencies. Anglicare was one of them to support them in their journey. We looked into that independent assessor stage that I mentioned earlier. And we found that there were no real expectations around time frames placed on those assessors. And as a result of that, and also there was no sort of understanding of the workload of the assessors before matters were referred to them. And so we looked to rebalance the workload to ensure that there were manageable workloads across the assessor pool. And we developed our own training material and bought some of the assessments in-house to see if we could trial that internally as well. And as I said, we were continuously getting legal advice along the way. We had stand-up meetings daily and we were encouraged to try, test and learn. We kept a log of ideas that we would review every day. And we, as I said, we had the permission to change things rapidly. So there were some things we could do straight away and we just enacted it. And there were other things that would take more of a consultation process and we put those into a different process by which we could work on achieving those. I put the slide in because I found it really helpful at the start of this project in communicating to the various stakeholders about what it is we were trying to achieve. And I think any project like this where the answer is uncertain requires a good visual diagram as a basis for some of these consultations. So what this diagram is essentially saying is that when the adoption's task force was established, as I said, we did that triaging process and we were identifying those cases. We thought we could move quite quickly. These ones were usually in the latter phases of an adoption process. And so initially that's the adoption task force. They are pushing a way to files towards the end line. Now that would require the established adoption services team to do some more of the pulling and the pushing. So that is bringing cases forward from earlier stages of the process rather than focusing solely on those that were in those latter stages like the task force was. If we were both doing that, we'd get a short-term gain in terms of reduced time frames for those cases. But we needed to be pulling those through. And once the task force had finished that initial work, we could also then round back and start pulling through cases from earlier phases in the diagram. So excuse my PowerPoint skills, but I found that a really effective diagram to have a lot of those conversations. Some examples of the reporting tools were used. As I said, the performance management regime was a bit limited and the data was not helpful. And as I said, it was age data. So you were looking at it a month out of date. And this is where we were using the real-time data to have weekly meetings with our sponsors and the head of adoption services and others. To really just go through for each entity, so adoption services, the adoption task force and Bernardo's been the major NGO player, to track forecast and actual applications to court. Not orders, but applications to court. Now, the difference between the forecast and the actuals in those early days was quite, the difference was quite significant. But as we started to learn more about the process and more about how long things took and more about the drivers of time, you could see those forecasts and actuals coming closer together. And so we sat down at these meetings. We had no other materials, no briefing notes and papers and things like that. We sat down with one page and that was the page. And we just talked through where things were at. And it really worked wonders in terms of making transparent for progress, but also making driving accountability for what you forecast and if it wasn't on forecast. There's an onus to provide some explanatory information as to why. So that was the weekly sponsor meeting. The case tracking pool is another tool we used internally. So one of the things that was, we think we improved a lot was that we had more interaction with the Supreme Court. Now, obviously there are reasons why you don't wanna, well, you can't get too close to the court in terms of operations and the legal side of things because they need to be independent. And there were very formal protocols as to how we engage the court when we started. However, we built relationships with the court registrars and administrators so that we could inquire on the status of matters that were at court. And when they had requisitions, which is when they come back and ask further information, we were able to head some of those off by saying, if there was a copy of a birth certificate and they needed an original, you are able to demonstrate that you had upturned every single stone to find that piece of information. And it would save weeks by the time you got a requisition investigator that came back. So we cut all that out. The court had indicated that they would endeavor to turn around adoption matters that after an application was made within 60 days if they were uncontested. And so those orange lines there are all the matters that were over 50 days at that particular time. And so that made us allowed us to have those conversations with the registrar and about inquiring about status. We, what I call misbusting. So we busted a lot of myths along the way. Now, if you're looking at an adoption process and you were starting with a blank canvas, these are the sorts of things that you would want to be considering along the way. What we had was a legacy system which we had to pretty much strip back and challenge the things that just didn't look right. Or there were alternative ways that we would like to, that we wanted to try. So I won't go through all of these, but, and these are really quite straightforward things. So at that time, there was a policy in place that police checks for prospective adoptive parents needed to be done by New South Wales Police. Now that required attending in person. There was a charge and it took a period of time to receive that police check. Now there are other agencies that rely on exactly the same databases, police providing that service. You don't have to attend in person. It costs less and it takes less time. So we were challenging these sorts of things. So why does it have to be New South Wales Police? Why can't we do it another way? As I said, legal advice all the time as to why we could or couldn't do something. You know, there was this prevailing view that everything that was required by court needed to be original documentation. We discovered that that wasn't actually the case. And that in some circumstances they would accept non-originals and photocopies. The on hold matters. So when we looked at the data around adoptions, we saw a number of these matters were on hold. And when we looked into that, a number of them were not on hold for any reason to do with the adoptive parents or the circumstances around the child, but for administrative reasons on the behalf of the department. And so we really just got underneath that to just understand why matters were on hold and which were the genuine things that should be on hold and which were the ones that could possibly be re-enacted. We were often told particularly at the start how complex adoptions were. Now in saying that, if you're not processing, if you're not involved in the adoptions process in New South Wales, there isn't really an established and why you're doing it. I mean, so anyone who was doing it in New South Wales were probably close to being the experts in the country. However, it's really just really just good case work and good interaction with your legal people. So, this myth that it was such a complex process, it's difficult, it's hard, it's hard, but it really is good case work. Locating birth parents, so an enormous amount of time was spent tracking down usually birth fathers, I have to say, who had for whatever reason disappeared off the radar or were not easily found. Every stone was upturned, every database explored, every phone call made, but there was no sense of how long, at what point do you say we've done everything we can? And so there were, you know, in some circumstances, over 12 months of trying to find a particular birth father and so on. The court doesn't require you to find the birth family if you have made every endeavor to do so and you can demonstrate that and that's so we enacted that. And it doesn't mean that that search doesn't continue beyond the adoption as well. So these are just some of the, just to give you an idea of the sorts of things that we were told were truths that we challenged and we're able to come up with alternative ways to do it without compromising quality, but certainly in ensuring that the process was more streamlined for the children and the adoptive parents and birth parents involved in this. Tell me if I'm running out of time, why don't you, Christopher? So this is the slide which just shows where we were in terms of the 67 adoption orders made in 2015-16, where we got to within one year as a result of doing some of the things I've talked about. 17-18, there was a new record set at 140. Now, that's when the adoption transformation program stepped away. So the task force that I talked about went into operations. It maintained some autonomy although it was under the same hierarchy of management and they're looking now to further integrate it properly, but for a while it did kind of operate as it was, but we just sort of changed the way they reported and EY stepped out. And this is probably what I'm most proud of in this whole process is that the numbers of adoptions were sustained, not only sustained, but vastly improved as you see there in 2019 to 2162. So 140% more increase from the 2015-16 figure. And this is not necessarily an increase in underlying demand for adoptions. This is the result of a clearing of a backlog of matters and undertaking the adoption process in half the time. So those numbers are not, as I said, necessarily an increase in underlying demand. But a really great example, I think, of how challenging ways of doing things, doing things differently, measuring the performance and success of those things and transitioning them back into the business as usual within the public sector. I think it's an excellent example of how that was done. We received a number of very generous feedback and positive feedback along the way, but I think this one really captures what we were trying to achieve and how we were trying to do things. This recognition that we were working collaboratively, this is with Angle Care in our incubator hub, providing prompt and accurate and legislatively informed advice. So think communication. Communication was an absolute key within this. Providing meaningful reports on progress. This is about keeping everyone in the loop in terms of where things are at with their matter. Not this information deficit that was present when we stepped in. There's been this increased capacity for change and to negotiate and embrace change. As I said, we had stand-up meetings every day and we were constantly reflecting and trialling new things, but we also had a couple of independent evaluations that were done. I'd call them more pulse checks than evaluations because they were quite rapid. But it just did give us an independent view of an observer looking in as to what they saw was working and what could be improved. And as a result of those evaluations, we changed our model. We renegotiated a contract with the Crown's list's office to flex it more. We focused on the Supreme Court relationship. As I said, that moved from an extremely formal relationship to at least some interaction at the registrar level around the status and progress of matters. The dialogue around requisitions, which I talked about, a real simple thing. In the districts, the manager casework signs off on the adoption matter when the file is put before them. They've usually got a pile of files on their desk for sign-off and it's not an insignificant thing for someone to sign off on someone's adoption. And so we found that they were often sitting there for some time before they actually got signed off. So we introduced warm sign-off. So that is we set up an appointment with those managers. A caseworker had been working on the adoption matter, would go along to talk about the case, to answer any questions that might come up and we just found that that really just saved a lot of time in getting those sign-offs. Yeah, so that's just some of the things that we changed as a result of the independent evaluations. And I think as evaluators, the experience really highlights the role of, for I guess, non-traditional evaluation methodologies or more formative evaluations, but with an emphasis on implementation and practice, where you need to understand what it takes to achieve successful implementation to understand the critical questions that need to be answered in terms of implementation, but also the adaptations that are necessary to achieve optimal change. So I think they're sort of the main things for consideration. Now I will probably pause there. So I think we'll probably take some questions. That's great. Thank you, Mark. We have got a couple of questions coming up through the chat, but I've just got a couple to start off with. Firstly, just to clarify, when we talk about open adoption, we're talking about foster carers who are already caring for these children, adopting their children, is that correct? That's right, yep. So the average age of a child adopted by their carer is seven years old. And when we talked about that delay of around five years in that process, that was particularly for open adoption or for all types of adoption? Specific to adoptions from foster care. So there being that delay of five years, even though that person was currently the child's foster carer. That's correct, yep. Okay, cool, just wanted to clarify. All right, and in one of your slides, you had a dot point around a cost-effectiveness analysis. Is that something that you did? Yes, we did do that, yep. So we gathered a whole lot of information about what it was costing to undertake the process in the status quo versus the task force model. And we found that it's difficult to cost casework at time because they're sharing it amongst adoption process and home visits and all of that, everything else that they undertake. But we estimated between 20 and 30% more cost-effective to undertake it in the way, in the model that we had established. Thank you. We've got a couple of questions coming in. So I might start going through them. This one is from Salegma Bride. Given the length of time taken to potentially receive data due to the length of time in the adoption process resulting in smaller variable samples, how do you ensure quality in the data you're reporting and making decisions on? Yeah, well we're talking to the, we're getting it from the horse's mouth, if that makes sense. So as I said, the data we were using day to day was not data that was reported outside of the team and our sponsors. And we used it to guide our decisions on what we might do next. And I guess, we also had a stamp so that it wasn't going anywhere else. But it was just really useful and I guess experience was the main thing. So we could see where a matter had been last time and where it had progressed and we could see that, oh, that's reasonable, you know. And yeah, I guess just talking to people who were just close to the cases that could actually validate some of the data that we were getting. Sorry, does that answer the question? Yeah, it is a tricky one because you've got a smaller pool there. But it is one of those ones where you probably need to use that qualitative data to back up. Absolutely, yeah. And we would always, when the actual reports came out, we'd always be sort of validating what we were seeing day to day versus what was reported. There's always missing data because it just takes time for people to enter information into the system and so forth. But like I said, if we're actually talking to those people and they're telling us about a matter that they haven't yet entered but they're going to tomorrow, then it was counted as real-time information that we could use. And we've got a question here from Mary Welsh. Has the ATP approach in this instance been documented? Were there any publications as a result of the EY's approach? No, and it's something that Mal is always talking to me about because it's something that we should write up. It's a presentation similar to this one have been given at various conferences. AES presented at ICA, which is the International Adoption Conference in Montreal and other places. So, but no, it hasn't been written up formally and it's something on my to-do list for sure. It will be. Watch this space. We've got another question here from Rebecca Roebuck. She says she was interested in the ongoing legal advice and she wants to know whether it was external to the department or in-house counsel. Yeah, so we got legal advice from internally from the department. Particularly, so for instance, at the start, we had a team of contracted caseworkers who worked remotely. So we found it was more efficient to be in the field and located in the field rather than coming to a central place. That meant taking files off site. And so we were told initially that that wasn't going to be able to happen, but we got the legal advice that as long as there was demonstrated, you could demonstrate you could keep it secure. That there was a proper contract between the subcontractors and the department, which there was, with confidentiality requirements and so forth, and that was acceptable. So that's the sort of advice we were getting, sort of really just day-to-day practical legal advice. Advice on the court process we were getting from the... Like I said, we had a flexible contract with the... Now the name escapes me, the CSO, the Crown Solicitor's Office in New South Wales. Whereby they would advise us on more of the sort of legal process type information and advice and sort of court processes as well. We have another question here from Natalie Hunter. Have you had discussion with SNAICC, the Peak Aboriginal Child Care Agency, in reference to adopting at-sea children? Yeah, so we recently did some work for the Commonwealth around the National Framework for Protecting Australia's Children, where we partnered with SNAICC around... It was more around all elements of permanency and the application of the Aboriginal child placement principles. So we have a very good relationship with SNAICC and we're, as I said, acknowledged up the front, very much mindful of how adoption is viewed by many Aboriginal people and very sensitive to that. Yeah, and just to reiterate that point, at the time when the department was working in this space, we were very conscious of ensuring that we adhered to the Aboriginal placement principles. And so adoption for Aboriginal children, as Mark mentioned up front, is the least preferential option for their care. So it's something that happens only by very, very exception and wasn't the focus of the work that we've been talking about. I might just... Just in case it's not clear to anyone, we had no say whatsoever in what children were in an adoption process. We sort of... That decision had been made and we came in at that point where that inquiry had been made and ensuring that that process was as streamlined as it could be given the evidentiary requirements of the court. And I've just got one final question. I think just around change management. So you showed that graph, which talked about how, even after EY had stepped out, those adoptions were still at really good levels. Do you have much of a sense of how many of those processes from the task force were actually transferred into mainstream? And if so, how that was handled? That might be one for you, Melissa, as well, perhaps. I like that. Yeah, and I might just acknowledge that this isn't just EY. It was an absolute collective effort with Bonardo's undertaking a number of quite a large portion of those adoptions and obviously the department, the Anglicare and the NGOs that we worked with. So we were really, I guess, the administrators ensuring we executed on the design and the model and so forth. But we had a fantastic team of casework professionals, legal professionals doing the actual work. So I really found my job was really helping to pave the way and let them do what they did best. So I just want to say that at the front, but maybe, Mel, you can pick up on how the case is going back into the status quo. I think in terms of Christabella, you're meaning more in terms of transition to BAU from the task force team, yeah. So that's been a long process, I think Mark alluded to it, for quite some time, the task force operated separately. And so some of that testing was occurring for a number of years before then transitioning in. And it's really only been in the last year that it's transitioned across, which I can't speak to from a department perspective because I've moved across to EY over that time. But from what we've heard, it's gone particularly well. And so most of those refinements to process have been adopted within the overall team now. And it's just one single team, so they have transitioned all back to BAU. Yeah, yeah. And as I mentioned, maintain those numbers throughout. Yeah, yeah. I am conscious of time, so we'd better wrap it up there. But Mark and Melissa, thank you so much for your time today. It's been a really interesting discussion. Yeah, thanks so much. Christelle, thanks to everyone who joined. Thank you. Thank you.