Improving the Archiving of Records in the Out-of-home Care Sector

Abstract

Senate Inquiries into the lives of people who grew up in care, highly critical Ombudsman reports, and advocacy groups for recent and past “care leavers” draw attention to the significance of the records for children growing up in out-of-home care. This article reports on a project in which an interdisciplinary team of social workers, archivists, and historians worked together with 12 community-sector (nongovernment) organisations to look at the question of how to improve the management of the records for people with experience of out-of-home care. A Self Assessment Tool was developed and deployed at two points in time to provide feedback to organisations about the quality of their record-keeping practices. Clear improvements could be documented over a 2-year period in all 12 of the organisations involved.