Changing Minds, Policies and Lives

The quality of care children receive, their learning experiences and relationships, are critical in shaping their future. This is particularly true in their first years of life. Quality child protection services play an important role in enhancing learning and achievement throughout children’s lives, in providing more positive lifelong opportunities and outcomes, and in reducing poor health in adult life. The key to a high-quality child protection system is to have clear, agreed standards based on evidence of best practice and effective systems to implement and monitor them. Given the importance of promoting quality, this paper provides a framework for designing tools to specify and use standards as part of the reform of the child protection system. This is to ensure that, wherever possible, families are supported to care for their children themselves.