The Secure Start® Podcast
In the same way that a secure base is the springboard for the growth of the child, knowledge of past endeavours and lessons learnt are the springboard for growth in current and future endeavours.
If we do not revisit the lessons of the past we are doomed to relearning them over and over again, with the result that we may never really achieve a greater potential.
In keeping with the idea we are encouraged to be the person we wished we knew when we were starting out, it is my vision for the podcast that it is a place where those who work in child protection and out-of-home care can access what is/was already known, spring-boarding them to even greater insights.
The Secure Start® Podcast
#17 The Hidden Strengths of Residential Care: Challenging the Status Quo with Dr Jenna Bollinger
Dr. Jenna Bollinger takes us on a revealing journey into the heart of what makes residential care truly effective for vulnerable children and young people. Drawing from her doctoral research on stability in out-of-home care, she challenges conventional wisdom and offers a fresh perspective on how we measure success in these settings.
The podcast opens with a powerful revelation: stability isn't simply about remaining in one placement for a long time. As Dr Bollinger explains, "If I was just told I have to leave my house today for no reason and I don't know where I'm going, I could be in my next house for 12 months, but I don't know how secure I would feel." This insight forms the foundation of her research, which discovered that meaningful relationships are what truly create stability for young people in care.
One of the most touching moments comes when Dr Bollinger shares a story about interviewing a young man who had been in residential care. When she suggested that staff caring about him made a difference, he firmly corrected her: "No, I felt loved." This profound statement highlights what makes residential care work—genuine connections that extend beyond professional boundaries, with former residents maintaining relationships with staff long after leaving care.
Dr Bollinger introduces her "Secure House" model, a practical framework for creating stability in residential settings. Built on a foundation of safety, with walls representing consistent staff relationships, and a ceiling of genuine care, this model provides organizations with clear guidance on what elements must be in place for young people to thrive. She emphasizes that while change is inevitable in these settings, how it's managed makes all the difference.
The conversation also explores how organizations themselves can become traumatized when working with trauma-affected children, and how reflective practice—particularly at leadership levels—can help create healthier workplaces where staff feel heard and valued.
Wondering how to improve outcomes for the most vulnerable children in our community? Listen now to discover practical insights from someone who's dedicated her career to creating healing environments for young people recovering from trauma and disrupted attachments.
Jenna’s Bio
Jenna has a Masters Degree in Forensic Psychology from the University of New South Wales, and a PhD from Monash University, where she investigated the experience of, and capacity for stability in, residential out of home care.
Jenna has worked in out of home care in different capacities since 2012 and is currently the Director of Psychology and Clinical Services for Knightlamp, which consults on assessment and implementation of therapeutic programs in out of home care across Australia.
Jenna also conducts a variety of assessments, including therapeutic assessments for out of home care, forensic assessments and parenting capacity assessments in the context of the child protection system.
We hope you enjoy our conversation.
Disclaimer
Information reported by guests of this podcast is assumed to be accurate as stated. Podcast owner Colby Pearce is not responsible for any error of facts presented by podcast guests. In addition, unless otherwise specified, opinions expressed by guests of this podcast may not reflect those of the podcast owner, Colby Pearce.
Welcome to the Secure Start podcast.
Jenna:If I was just told I have to leave my house today, I'm just told I have to get out for no reason and I don't know where I'm going. I could be in my next house for 12 months, but I don't know how secure I would feel. And so my research was trying to unpack what constitutes stability. Relationships are what makes stability. Those people spoke really highly of their time in residential care. They felt that they belonged to someone, that there was someone who cared for them, someone who loved them, someone who would protect them, someone who liked them. And I just don't think the research bears out that residential care is as bad as what everyone makes it out to be. While the outcomes may be somewhat worse, maybe, not are, but may be somewhat worse for residential care, comparatively they may not actually be worse at all because they're not on an even playing field at the starting point. Organisations become traumatised in and of themselves and so for an organisation to work effectively we need to start at the top and make sure that everything going on at the top is stable and healthy and therapeutic care is astonishingly difficult we need to have good staff who are trained who have really good supervision who have time together to build a connection as a team because fundamentally this all lives and dies with the staff
Colby:Welcome to the secure start podcast. I'm Colby Pearce, and joining me for this episode is a local, to me, expert in the design and delivery of therapeutic programs in out-of-home care here in Australia. Before I introduce my guest, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands that we meet on. For me, it's the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains. For my guest, it's the Darug people. And I'd like to acknowledge the continuing connection the living Kaurna and Dharug people feel to land, waters, culture and community. I'd also like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. My guest this episode is Dr. Jenna Bollinger. Jenna has a master's degree in forensic psychology from the University of New South Wales. and a Doctorate of Philosophy from Monash University where she investigated the experience of and capacity for stability in residential out-of-home care. Jenna has worked in out-of-home care in different capacities since 2012 and is currently the Director of Psychology and Clinical Services for Nightland. which consults on assessment and implementation of therapeutic programs in out-of-home care across Australia. Jenna also conducts a variety of assessments, including therapeutic assessments for out-of-home care, forensic assessments, and parenting capacity assessments in the context of the child protection system. Welcome, Jenna.
Jenna:Thanks for having me.
Colby:Well, yeah, and thank you for coming on. And I'm really excited about doing this podcast because I think we both have done, well, you do, and I have done similar things in our work, particularly insofar as developing and implementing therapeutic approaches to care. Jenna, I've I just wanted to start off by asking you how you got into working in this space.
Jenna:Yeah, look, it was by accident, actually. I was doing my master's and I was working in hospitality and hated it. And so I applied for a bunch of jobs and I got a call back from a residential care agency and I did not know what residential care was. But I went. and went to an info session and did a bit of an interview, I think. And I got hired as a casual residential care worker. And that was where it started, really. So I worked on the floor. for about 18 months. And then I finished my master's degree. And at that point, they happened to, you know, the stars aligned and one of the psychologists went off on maternity leave. So there was a one-year maternity leave cover as a specialist psychologist. And for whatever reason, I got it, which was amazing. And I think it was actually really fortuitous that I, it was only for one year because it didn't actually end up that way she resigned and I got a permanent position but I felt really compelled to do as much as I could because I only had a year you know I didn't have time to settle in and find my way and work out what to do you know it was sort of boots on the ground, full steam ahead. I only had a year to learn as much as I could. And because I'd worked on the floor, I had some sense of what happened and what didn't work and what did work. And then I pretty much just stayed in varying capacities ever since.
Colby:And you said... Interestingly, you talked about, you tried to learn as much as you could in that first year. I wonder who were the, what were the bodies of work or who were the people that you drew the most knowledge and or inspiration from? Look,
Jenna:Bruce Perry was right up there for me. He was quite a remarkable inspiration for me. And I would, is... I would still say that his book, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, is the most compelling and easily read and digested book about trauma that has ever been written. And I recommend it to anyone, really. I've got three copies of it myself. And I just think it's a brilliant book. And I have read everything that he's written. I've seen him in person regularly. And I think that the way he explains things is so readily understood and readily read. You know, you could read it like a novel. And so his work on brain development and trauma therapy were really influential for me. And since then, I have sort of expanded my reach, looking at Bessel van der Kolk. I'm a huge fan of Martin Teicher at Harvard. I don't know if you've heard of him, but he is extraordinary.
Colby:Tell me what's extraordinary about him.
Jenna:Well, if you ever have the opportunity to hear him speak, You'll need to take some Ritalin first because he just speaks so fast that you're basically, you know, you need something to help you keep up. He's brilliant. And the work he has done on identifying the impact, you know, Bruce Perry talks a lot about type and timing of trauma, which we know, but Martin Teicher has worked on that. on being more precise. You know, in girls aged six to eight in the corpus callosum, this is some of the effects if you have this type of abuse. Like it's extraordinary work and it's really complicated and difficult to digest. So it's not a beginner material, but his work is just extraordinary. So there's been a lot of researchers that have influenced women me and the way I do things. Oh, I also really like Dave Ziegler. I think he's fantastic too. I've seen him present. I've got a couple of his books. So, you know, it's sort of all over the place.
Colby:What does Dave Ziegler, what does he bring to the work?
Jenna:Well, so he runs a facility in America called Jasper Mountain. And he has written a number of books and a number of papers as well that are also really accessible. You can read them. You can understand the impact of trauma on children. But because he runs sort of a residential facility for even young children, because it's different over in America, I suppose. And so he's got lots of approaches that are a bit novel. I think there's this amazing facility and I haven't been, I haven't been, I wanted to go, but I think it's in Oregon. So it's a bit, it's not really on the track holiday, but you know, and there's, there's horses and chickens and there's, you know, a school on site, you know, it's just, it looks like a really amazing sort of place to do really good work. And his writings are really accessible.
Colby:Yeah. I'm getting the sense that the neurobiology, what comes really under the heading of the neurobiology of trauma is really influential in your work and your approach to the work. Are there any other kind of theory traditions or theoretical traditions that you find also of benefit to
Jenna:you? Look, I've written a lot about attachment theory. I've read a lot about attachment theory, which is every psych student's trauma memory. You talk to anyone who studied psychology and say attachment, they go, oh, God, no, Baldy. But I think when you look at it through the lens of trauma and development, attachment can really help as an important theory and an important way of looking at it. And I've had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people about about attachment and attachment theory and You know, they happily say, oh, I get it now. I get it now. I see it's not just a strange situation. It actually applies to real life.
Colby:I've written a little bit about attachment too. And it wasn't ever a trauma memory because there may be different epochs, time epochs, but they never taught attachment theory when I was at university um i had to i got it yes people asked me when i appear on podcasts and i think how i really first started to become interested in it was part of a an assignment in my masters where we were all split up to do developmental domains researched them brought a paper on them and i got social emotional so um that's where There were some precursors to it, but attachment theory became important then. And I agree with you. I think attachment theory also provides a very strong explanatory basis for things that... for when parental care goes seriously awry.
Jenna:Absolutely. Couldn't agree
Colby:more. Yeah. And you... I mentioned when I talked about your bio a little bit earlier, you researched residential care as part of your Doctor of Philosophy project. Can you tell me, tell the people who watch and listen to this podcast all about your research and what you found?
Jenna:Yes.
Colby:Yeah.
Jenna:So my PhD was looking at stability in residential care. I was just looking at it in New South Wales, but I don't imagine that findings would be massively different around Australia, but I haven't done that. So I was interested in looking at stability because... Well, because decisions get made about where to place children in residential care. And, you know, I believe firmly that everyone does the best that they can do with the information that they have. But from my experience, there was very little frameworks guiding how decisions are made. It's rather just a matching template that someone's put together and you kind of hope for the best.
Colby:Yeah.
Jenna:And so I thought, well, what do we do with that? What do we do with that information? And so I wanted to explore stability, this sort of broad concept. And when I started looking at the literature, I found that not only is there not much research that looks at stability, there's virtually none... There's very little that looks at instability. There is virtually none that looks at stability itself. But I think I found two. I think I found two papers that actually looked at stability, not instability. And they found that there was virtually no effect of stability. Instability is bad. Stability, null. And I thought, well, that doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. So what do we do with that? So then I dug a little deeper and the conclusion I came to when I was looking at this sort of broad brush of stability and instability research is that they were measuring stability in basically a placements over time form. So X number of placements in X amount of time is stable. Y amount of placements in X amount of time is unstable. Pick a timeframe, 12 months, 18 months. If you have zero or one moves in that time, you've got stability. If you have more than that, you have instability. Let's look at the outcomes. And I thought, well, if I was just told I have to leave my house today, I'm just told I have to get out for no reason and I don't know where I'm going next. I could be in my next house for 12 months, but I don't know how secure I would feel because, well, now I know I can just get kicked out. So is not moving placements for a period of time sufficient to be considered stability? Shock? The answer is no. And so my research was trying to unpack what constitutes stability. And look, to be honest with you, it's really basic. It's really simple. And I genuinely worried that the PhD wouldn't pass because it's so straightforward. But actually, it was really, really well regarded, really well regarded. And I think that's because while nothing I found is jaw-droppingly remarkable, it puts an academic basis to what We all essentially know to be true, even if we haven't thought about it that way before. And so essentially the findings were that relationships are what makes stability. For the young people that have strong, profound relationships with the staff members that they live with, they feel stable. They have good outcomes. And for those that don't, they don't feel stable and the outcomes are potentially if you're depending on where they may find that stability from. So obviously remaining in a placement for a prolonged period of time is a fundamental part of stability. You can't build relationships. You can't have anything else, but it's just not enough. It's not the core features, not the defining feature of stability. Does that make sense?
Colby:Yeah, yeah. There's two things that I wonder about listening to you speak about. The first of it is, why were you interested in stability as a topic of research interest? The second bit I was going to say was probably more an observation, but of the last little bit, which was talking about relationships and connection. I wondered whether you considered belonging, a sense of belonging in that.
Jenna:Yes, that was actually one of the findings, yes, quite literally. So, I mean, look, my thesis is massively long. You're welcome to read it. But absolutely belonging is, was a key thing that was part of it. You know, it's going to take me forever if I rattle through the thesis to try and find it. But that sense of having a home, that sense of belonging to someone. So one of my favourite quotes in the whole thesis is, All of my research was I talked to a young man who had had some really solid relationships with some staff he'd worked with for a long time. And he was telling me about the relationship he had with them. And he said that he felt loved. And I said, oh, wow. So it made a difference to you that you felt like they really cared about you. And he said, no, I felt loved. And he corrected me. I had undersold it. I underplayed what he was saying to me for whatever reason. And he said, no, I felt loved. And those staff, I mean, at the time it was a good couple of years ago that I interviewed him, but at that time he said that those staff knew his children, that he still called them if he needed a hand. And I would imagine that that was still going on now. And, you know, another thing, Actually, a few of them told me that the staff knew their children after they had left and they were still in touch with them. A number of staff had referred them to me for my research, so they had strong enough relationships that they could do that. And those people spoke really highly of their time in residential care. They felt that they belonged to someone, that there was someone who cared for them, someone who loved them, someone who would protect them, someone who liked them.
Colby:Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? When you contrast that with other roles in the sector, so for example, the therapeutic role, the role of the therapist, and especially long-term therapy with young people in out-of-home care, that's something that has been, I guess, the mainstay of my practice over the last 30 years. And As a psychologist, we have different boundaries around our work, but it is the case, though. I have had the same phone number since about 2001. So the young people still contact me that I knew. Not all of them, obviously, but quite a number of them do. And I think that that's, yes, it stems from feeling like they mattered. Yeah. To me. And we hung around. Yeah. Yes. You know, hanging around for them. And I wonder, the other part of my question was just about what piqued your interest in stability versus what did you think was the case in relation to instability before you did your interviews? I
Jenna:don't know. Look, as I said, I don't think anything came out of it that I was like, what? Oh, my goodness. That's amazing. There were a number of moments of, wow, that's so cool, but very little was shocking. You know, no one said, oh, actually it's having eggs for breakfast on a Saturday, where you go, wow, okay, fair enough. You know, it all made sense. It was about feeling cared about. It was about feeling safe. It was about... the staff showed up. What was maybe a little bit surprising and unexpected was that no one really talked about co-resident stability. That was less of an issue. I don't know that anyone really raised it. If I asked about it, they'd all kind of, not all actually, a number of them would say yes. Yeah, that matters. But that didn't really come up. And even then it sort of felt like it was a bit more of if it's good, that's great. If it's bad, it's bad. But if it's okay, that's fine. That doesn't really matter. And I thought that would have been more of a feature.
Colby:Absolutely. I do too. I think in foster care, where you've got multiple young people fostered in the same home environment and one of the children moves out, then I've always thought and observed that that can be quite destabilising for the children who remain in that placement. Residential care. one of the things, ways in which I've always thought about it is that it does provide an opportunity for stability of care, for stability of relational connection that is superior to foster care. And that's one of those things that people would be like, Don't say that. You can't say that. No, no, no. Residential care, bad. Option of last resort. Option of last resort. Why would you want to send any child to residential care? You only send those who cannot be placed elsewhere to residential care. But there are... And it is one of the things that I like to pursue on this podcast. There are clear... aspects of residential care where there are opportunities and superiority, where it's superior in some respects, and there are opportunities afforded to us with residential care that are much less vexed than with foster care. For example, family contact and family reconnection, I think much easier with residential care.
Jenna:There's lots that's easier in residential care, I think. And I just don't think the research bears out that residential care is as bad as what everyone makes it out to be. In Australia, we actually have one of the lowest levels of residential care use in the world. I think we're at about 5%, 5% to 6%, whereas over in Israel, it's at 95% residential care. Oh, look, I've done a little thumbs up.
Colby:What
Jenna:was that? It's the way of doing things. out of high care, right? And all in between, UK and USA, about 13%, give or take. And so, but the research also shows that in countries with lower levels of use, those in foster care and those in residential care, they're actually not the same at baseline. So while the outcomes may be somewhat worse, maybe, not are, but maybe somewhat worse for residential care. Comparatively, they may not actually be worse at all because they're not on an even playing field at the starting point. But the research doesn't necessarily suggest that residential care outcomes are worse because the leaving care research very, very rarely differentiates the groups of care leavers. So you can very rarely find outcome measures that striated for residential care, for foster care, for kinship care. So it's very, very hard to actually identify whether the outcomes are any worse at any rate.
Colby:Yeah, there is a serious dearth of good quality research into care leavers and I think your point about where they start is really interesting. And effectively, you would be needing to look at effect sizes, treating foster care and residential care as interventions and then looking at effect sizes to see. So you work with organisations who are delivering care. I was just wondering, Really keen to hear a little bit about your experiences of doing that. And in particular, what sort of work are you doing with those organisations?
Jenna:So we do work with various organisations doing various things. Doesn't that sound... suspicious. It just really depends on what they need. So, you know, sometimes we will advise on therapeutic care plans for foster kids, for whole agencies. Sometimes we deliver reflective practice to the management teams. Sometimes we work directly in the houses, you know, giving advice as to what the staff might need. And other times we do assessments of what's happening and if it's appropriate or whatever. So whatever is needed is kind of what we do. My boss delivers training. And so, you know, we do whatever is needed and with the various organizations who need things from us.
Colby:Okay. You mentioned in there something piques my interest was the reflective groups with leadership.
Jenna:Yes.
Colby:Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about implementing reflective practice with leadership.
Jenna:Reflective practice is a bit like attachment theory, really, and it tends to get a reaction from people until they do it. And once you do it, you tend to be relatively sold on it. It's quite an extraordinary opportunity to reflect, but also to sort of recenter a lot of the work, you know, because we know that trauma is traumatic and working with trauma is traumatic, that organizations become traumatized in and of themselves. And so for an organization to work effectively, we need to start at the top and make sure that everything going on at the top is stable and healthy and untraumatized. And so starting at the top by doing the reflective practice, we can get everyone back on the same page. They can communicate with each other. They can reflect on what's going well. They can reflect on what's going not so well. They can help each other. There's not so much of an agenda as there often is when you have those big team meetings where every minute is structured of people telling you all the things that they're doing well. And so people have the opportunity to really talk about things. And by the end of it, you know, it feels a bit magical almost that people feel happier at the end of it. They feel more connected to each other and more positive about the work that they do.
Colby:It's therapeutic.
Jenna:Yeah. So we found all the hard parts.
Colby:Well, I think, yeah, I think there's a couple of things I would say is that, yeah, When people are able to be collectively in a leadership team a little bit vulnerable with each other to talk about the challenges, their own challenges in delivering the work. the response is often an empathic one and connection deepens. And I've spoken to, in various other podcasts previously, this issue of reflective supervision has been quite a significant one in terms of it being a very common theme of saying, one, it's really good. Two, it really helps with the work. And also three, that there's something in it for retention
Jenna:as
Colby:well, which relates a little bit back to what you were saying about stability and your thesis. And, you know, those relationships that those young people had in residential care, one of the factors that would impact that is the stability of the workforce. So that's a very interesting thing. part of the work. Yeah. And traumatised organisations. I mean, every time I hear it put like that, which is not very often, I think of big organisations like our statutory child protection agencies, who are subject to a high level of scrutiny from time to time. And in some senses, they're very large and probably unwieldy. And I often think about and turn my mind to how difficult it is working in those organisations from the top to the bottom. and how good it would be to... I think how much benefit there would be to the children to roll out reflective supervision from the top. I hate saying to the bottom, but let's just say from the top and keep going. Yeah. Everyone has an opportunity to do it. And I have a little saying, which is... There is the old, there's the meme saying that you see, which I'm ambivalent about, which is that the hurt people hurt people, which is kind of true, but a lot of hurt people don't hurt people. But what I think is probably more true is that hurt people hear people. Yeah. heard people, hear people. And so when you're in a reflective group where you feel heard and acknowledged in your experience, you are then better able to consider the experience of others.
Jenna:Yes. I couldn't agree more. And that was one of the things that did come out of my research was this sort of need for staff to be supported. to do their work. And exactly as you were talking about feeling heard, I think that one of the greatest challenges of the organisations is to communicate. And I think, you know, when I was talking to, you know, I talked to floor staff and they say, you know, we talk to management, we tell them we're at capacity, we can't take any more, we can't handle this, this match is going to be bad. This is a bad idea. And the management say, cool, thanks for letting me know. And then they go ahead and do whatever they need to do anyway. But when you talk to the management team, it's not that that's not an accurate representation, but there's so much more behind it where, you know, the funding bodies set up targets and if you don't meet those targets you don't get funded so if you've got one bed available and they've got a child that needs a placement fundamentally it doesn't matter if it's a good match necessarily you could you could push back i suppose but there's a limit to how much pushback you can have and still get funded and so i mean i think uh some more of that backwards and forwards communication would really ease some of those relationships where the staff are feeling heard You've told us that you can't handle this. And I hear you. Unfortunately, the funding rules mean that there's nothing I can do about this. But as soon as we can do something about it, we will. What support can we give you to help you manage this, given the limits of what we can do? And I think those conversations don't happen. And so the staff feel unheard and they feel put upon and their workloads increase because as soon as you put a new person in, it is harder. As soon as you change things, it is harder. And if the match is bad, it is harder again, right? And so they're overwhelmed, they're pressured. So they take leave. So then you put in casual stuff or agency stuff and then it explodes again. And we don't have anyone feeling heard. We don't have anyone feeling supported. When in the first instance, everyone was right. Everyone did the right thing. Everyone did the best that they could. And so some reflective practice with with everyone, with, you know, line managers and with floor staff and with whole management teams and with whole floor teams and everything in between, I think we can get somewhere a little bit more productive because, I mean, everyone has, I'm sure everyone can understand all of those limitations. You know, they're all intelligent, competent people that I speak to and I've worked with and they would understand everything. those limits and we could work together better.
Colby:If we understood each other's experience
Jenna:more. Yeah.
Colby:Yeah. And I think, you know, when you were talking, I was thinking about, yeah, the floor staff and management as well. Management feel put upon by the funding bodies. Exactly. Yeah, the bodies that engage them to do it. And just all round, it is a difficult process. job and it's a bit i think of it a little bit like this is that um across a long career talking to lots of children predominantly children recovering from a tough start to life i haven't found that there's many who like school
Jenna:yeah
Colby:but um but they have to go to school it's the law and i think so there are always problems that cannot be solved cannot be solved But at least they can be heard about. And that's almost as good, if not just as good, in many instances.
Jenna:Yes.
Colby:We can't solve or change the situation, but feeling heard and understood and acknowledged about it is very powerful.
Jenna:Absolutely.
Colby:Yeah. Apart from those challenges of staff and management, What else do you see as the challenges that exist in terms of delivering good residential care to children and young people? I
Jenna:think probably one of the biggest challenges is that all organisations these days purport to being therapeutic. Trauma-informed. Trauma-informed care. We all do therapeutic care. No one says that they don't. But therapeutic care is astonishingly difficult and it is not something that is necessarily happening all the time. And I think that helping people, helping organisations to understand what it means to be trauma-informed and what it means to have those really... considered, planned conversations with young people for everything to be considered. Every interaction is understood. Every interaction is thought through. That is astonishingly difficult for the relationship to be front and center is astonishingly difficult when we're talking about attachment disordered young people who are not going to see your care and say, oh, gosh, thank you so much. That's what I was after. Thank you. No.
Colby:No.
Jenna:They don't. If they did, it wouldn't be hard. But, you know, attachment trauma, I mean, sometimes manifests that way, I suppose. We probably don't get called in to talk about those kids. But so much of the time it doesn't. It manifests with testing and pushing and rejecting and damaging, not necessarily physically but emotionally and emotionally. To consistently show up and understand and feel hurt and cope with that is astonishingly difficult. Yeah. And I think that is the challenge for us for now, forever. I can't really see that changing, which is why we need organisations to be less traumatised so that we can support staff better.
Colby:And reflective... Circa vision is important in that key, really. I'm wondering if there's anything else that you have come across that helps to detraumatize organizations. It's a bit like a cure for tantrums in kids. If you can come up with that,
Jenna:you
Colby:are set. You're like the family that invented the little umbrellas that go into the alcoholic drinks.
Jenna:Yes. No, I mean, I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. I really don't know the answer to that. I think, you know, when I did my research, I put together a model. of what I call a secure house, a stable house. And if I can find it really quickly, I'll talk you through it. But it was, you know, this sort of this house that I designed, you know. In the end, I got it drawn up by a graphic designer because my version was done on, you know, paint, you know, with a square and a triangle on top and some, you know, handwritten and then on my iPad, you know, just writing in various things. And so, you know, sort of based on the analysis that I put together, I sort of put together this model of a home that is sort of has the key features in the, you know, the floor and the roof and the walls. And these are the key things that you need. But then, you know, you've got to have your roof and your windows and your front door. You know, you can't have a house without four walls and a floor. But you don't really have a house if there's not a door and some windows either. So there might be slightly less room. necessary but but really necessary you know and so my house sort of takes that sort of form and so in the four main you know the floor is safety on the main walls we've got connectedness to staff and consistent staff on the ceiling we've got genuine care that's that love that we talked about but then on the roof we've got training and supervision we've got trauma-informed care In the windows, we've got good matching and peer relationships. Coming out of the chimney, we've got pushback so that we've got the higher-ups pushing back against the agencies when they can and saying, this is not good, we can't be doing this. And then you've got, you know, in the front door, we've got planned and communicated changes because change is inevitable. Staff will leave. Staff will retire. Staff will get moved to different houses. Young people will have to move for various reasons. And so that is part of life. Change is part of life. That's why I put it on the door because it comes and goes. I thought that was quite clever.
Colby:That is clever.
Jenna:And then I've got a plant on the outside where we've got casual staff and ongoing staff contact, which were some of the other features. You know, casual staff are also an inevitability, but there are ways of doing it better, you know, ways of having pools of casual staff that work with various houses, that know the kids and know the staff. And so while they may not be permanent staff, they're not randoms either. They're known. They're familiar. And that idea of ongoing staff contact. In this house, it doesn't solve all the world's problems, but I think if we put it all together, we'd probably be a little bit closer to solving those issues that are plaguing residential care. Because the staff are cared for. They're supervised properly. They've got good training. We've got good casual. So if the staff need to take time off, it doesn't destabilize the house for the other staff that's left on shift or when everyone comes back from leave. You know, if we do it right, it's just less hard for everyone all the time.
Colby:So you're in a meeting with the heads of the commissioning body, the funders, the policy makers. Invariably in this space, it's the local statutory child protection agency. What are you going to tell them? What are you going to say? This is what you need to do to improve the quality of education therapeutic residential care or residential care for children and young people across our jurisdiction? What are you going to say to them?
Jenna:Well, you need to fund it, which I think they do. I think the funding's probably there. We need to have good staff who are trained, who have really good supervision, who have time together to build a connection as a team because fundamentally, This all lives and dies with the staff. You know, the young people, they are who they are and it is not their responsibility to make this work. You know, you can't ask them to be anything other than who they are and to be loved as they are. So it lives and dies on the staff. So how do we get them to be as good as they can be doing this impossibly hard job? and that is that we need to support them. And, you know, the funding rules are what they are, so we can't change that, really. We just have to support them and we need to listen, as you say, be heard.
Colby:It's interesting. That's probably a piece of advice that can go all the way through their own organisation as well, looking after the staff. Yeah. Looked after staff, yeah. are more effective in their role.
Jenna:Yeah.
Colby:Yeah. Now, I had a question from my previous podcast guest, who was Ben Pryke and Susan Barton from the Lighthouse Foundation. I give my guest, and I'll give the same to you, I give my guest an opportunity to ask a question for the next guest. Now, I actually, as we've been talking, I've been thinking this is probably been at least partially answered by you. I'll read the question just so our listeners or watchers know what the question is. So the question was, how can we meaningfully integrate the voices and insights of people with lived experience into the development, delivery and evaluation of therapeutic residential care models or services, I guess?
Jenna:Yeah. I reckon I'm going to answer this differently to how you think I'm going to.
Colby:Well, okay. Let me tell you what I thought. Okay. Why I think there's been a little bit of overlap is that in a way your thesis went some way along towards that. Is that how you thought I was going to answer it?
Jenna:Yeah, probably.
Colby:Okay. Well, you go ahead.
Jenna:Okay.
Colby:You go ahead.
Jenna:All right. Okay. I don't know. is my answer. And the reason I don't know is because, all right, so this is a bit of a long story. So give me a minute. Let me give a bit of backstory. Through the course of other work that I do, I do a lot of forensic assessments and I interview people for upcoming court appearances. Through the course of that, I interviewed a number of people who were in residential care who didn't know that they were in residential care. Now, you ask, I say, they hadn't heard the term residential care. So some careful questioning, they could tell me that they'd been in a group home or a boy's home, or they, you know, could tell me that there were staff and other kids, it wasn't a family, but they'd never heard the term residential care. And so when we think about lived experience voices, they are crucial, but they're The lived experience voices we usually hear are of remarkable young men and women who have done really well, who have the words, who have the language to talk about their experience, who have the connections to people who can say, hey, Jill, tell us about your experiences. Someone who wants to go to create and be a youth ambassador. Someone who wants to go into social work and psychology and do research. There's a lot of PhD students with lived experience and they are remarkable. And those are the voices that we hear. You know whose voices we don't hear? The young people in prison. The ones who are on the street, the ones who don't have any connections to anyone, and the ones that didn't even know they were in residential care, even if they saw my flyer on the side of the road saying, hey, were you in residential care? I want to talk to you. Even if they felt compelled to ring me, they didn't know that that applied to them. So my thinking is we actually need to work out how to engage people not everyone necessarily, but a broader community of lived experience, young people, not just the ones who are doing well enough to stay connected and who can use their words. What about the ones with intellectual disabilities, the ones who have gone on into NDIS-funded accommodations? How do we hear everyone's voices? Because I'm not sure that the voices that we hear are representative, even though they're remarkable. And I want to hear what they have to say. I'm just not sure we're covering everything that we need to with regards to lived experience. I'm hoping, I'm trying, I'm trying with a group of researchers at Monash to forward some research in this area. We are looking to pay attention to people whose voices have not been heard. We are looking to research. There's been a lot of research about the pathways from out-of-home care into youth justice. There's been remarkably little research into the pathway from out-of-home care to adult justice and the adult prison system. And there's been a number of people that I have interviewed who have bypassed the juvenile justice system entirely. And they go straight from out-of-home care into the world and then randomly into the adult justice system. And we want to know what those pathways are. And those are voices we don't get to hear too often. You know, what happened? What is that pathway? Is it more like the out-of-home care to juvenile justice pathway? Or is it more like... a different pathway. You know, if I ended up in prison, what is that pathway? Is it more like that? I don't know. But there's voices that we need to hear in order to inform our ongoing development. So Lighthouse Foundation, if you want to do some research with me, give me a call or if anyone else wants to.
Colby:Yes, Lighthouse. Well, absolutely. And Lighthouse Foundation, I think probably themselves have captured a little bit of the picture here. I couldn't agree with you more in what you've said. I think in order to capture the broader spectrum of care leavers, we need to follow them up. And the research with them is highly lacking. No one's following them up. Our statutory child protection agencies, at least to date, there hasn't been significant endeavour that I know of in the jurisdictions that I'm across, including my own, to really make sure we keep tabs on or have a relationship with our young people such that we can keep tabs some level of involvement with them. An organisation like Lighthouse is in a better position to track these young people transitioning to adulthood because they are a service provider and they provide services beyond 18. Another group that you mentioned, when you were mentioning the groups that we need to consider, are the care leavers who have their own children removed, which is quite, you know, which is, I'm not sure, I can't say with any authority what proportion of care leavers that is the case, but that would represent a really significant challenge for our statutory child protection agencies that the children you raised had such poor parenting models that they were considered unsafe to raise their own children. Their parenting models, often their most dominant parenting model was the state as a parent.
Jenna:Yes. Look, there's a couple of brilliant researchers at Monash who have looked at early parenting in care leavers. And they might be interesting people for you to have a chat to, because I think from my conversations with them, that there's also a whole lot of you know, oversight and intervention. And often I think they're not even given much of an opportunity to parent. before having state intervention. So I'm happy to pass on some details to you if you'd like to have
Colby:it. Yeah, I'd love to. I'm always open to hearing about other people I could have on the pod. And I was writing down David Ziegler's name. I hope I spelled it correctly earlier. And listen, it's been great to have you on. Before we finish, I tend to give my guests an opportunity to ask ask me a question without notice before we finish up. I've asked you a lot of questions. Is there anything you'd like me to respond to before we finish up?
Jenna:What would you say is the biggest challenge facing residential care?
Colby:I think that it probably is staff. Not that the staff are the problem, but in terms of how we look after the staff. And I do think that funding needs to take into account opportunities for ongoing reflective practice. See, the big challenge, I guess, in the work that we do is that We are the only species that has psychologists that tell people how to raise children. Yeah. So a lot of people are like, well... we know how to raise children. We remember being raised. We learnt as much from what our parents did well as what they did poorly. And we obviously have an instinct, just like every other species, the parents, the young has. I think part of it, part of the problem is amongst residential staff as well as kinship and foster carers is seeing the value in in being trained in therapeutic care so but also but also um i think ensuring that they're looked after that they hang around they've got that stickability that that kinship carriers for example excel with you know because if they're kin they do stick more um and that they think about what what they're delivering. They spend more time being mindful and holding the young people in mind that they're working with. I think those are challenges. I do think that there needs to be more money into residential care in order to support more reflective practice. I think reflective practice, my view is you need to have at least some guide a model that guides and becomes a framework for reflection, for supporting reflection and developing understandings. Which probably I could talk for a very long time about. But yeah, I think I agree with you. I think the staff is where we... should primarily be putting our focus to. And look, I would also say, as I've said before, I don't intend to criticise stuff. It's not my intention to make staff feel criticised for the job that they're already doing. They're doing the best they can, in my observation, the best they can with the structures and support and... funding that they have. And it's unfair to put all residential care, residential childcare together because there's great variability in what organisations like the Lighthouse, you know, for example, the difference between what the Lighthouse can provide, what is provided at Hurstbridge Farm and what's provided in other residential childcare organisations. concerns. So I think getting consistency of residential care. So, you know, when we talk about research, see, this is what I mean, I could keep going. When we talk about research and we want to look at outcomes for residential care, we have to consider that not all residential care is the
Jenna:same. For sure.
Colby:And is that a problem? We need to perhaps be looking at um remedying that um yeah just like not all families are the same and you know foster care outcomes well how far down that rabbit hole do you want to go in terms
Jenna:of tough research it's really it's why no one does it
Colby:yeah yeah you're undoubtedly uh onto something there
Jenna:But
Colby:look, as I said, thank you again for coming on and perhaps our paths will cross another time and maybe I'll have you back again for another conversation if I
Jenna:haven't
Colby:scared you off.
Jenna:Thank you.
